How buyers perceive the credibility of advisors in online marketplace: review balance, review count and misattribution

Abstract

In an online marketplace, buyers rely heavily on reviews posted by previous buyers (referred to as advisors). The advisor's credibility determines the persuasiveness of reviews. Much work has addressed the evaluation of advisors' credibility based on their static profile information, but little attention has been paid to the effect of the information about the history of advisors' reviews. We conducted three sub-studies to evaluate how the advisors' review balance (proportion of positive reviews) affects the buyer's judgement of advisor's credibility (e.g., trustworthiness, expertise). The result of study 1 shows that advisors with mixed positive and negative reviews are perceived to be more trustworthy, and those with extremely positive or negative review balance are perceived to be less trustworthy. Moreover, the perceived expertise of the advisor increases as the review balance turns from positive to negative; yet buyers perceive advisors with extremely negative review balance as low in expertise. Study 2 finds that buyers might be more inclined to misattribute low trustworthiness to low expertise when they are processing high number of reviews. Finally, study 3 explains the misattribution phenomenon and suggests that perceived expertise has close relationship with affective trust. Both theoretical and practical implications are discussed.

A systematic review of perceived value toward online review on s-commerce platform

“…How buyers perceive the credibility of advisors in online marketplace: review balance, review count and misattribution (Wu, 2015) Trust…”

The use of user-generated content for business intelligence in tourism: insights from an analysis of Croatian hotels

“…Online peer reviews are very influential also because such reviews are considered to be objective and trustworthy in presenting real experiences Traveler's Road to Decision,' 2014. This view is shared by a number of other researchers (Filieri et al, 2015;Gretzel & Yoo, 2008;Liu, Bi, & Fan, 2017;Petrescu, O'Leary, Goldring, & Ben Mrad, 2017;Yuan, Hong, & Pavlou, 2012); destination and hotel management should pay particular attention to the mixed and negative reviews, since these are considered even more trustworthy (Wu, Noorian, Vassileva, & Adaji, 2015).…”

Online Review Characteristics and Trust: A Cross‐Country Examination

“…Fifth, research on online reviews has primarily been conducted in developed countries (Yin et al., ; Banerjee, Bhattacharyya, & Bose, ); limited research has examined the generalizability of the knowledge to other countries such as China (Wu, Noorian, Vassileva, & Adaji, ). This study tests the proposed framework in the United States and China, offering guidance to U.S. retailers exploring the Chinese market (e.g., Costoc, Amazon.com) and Chinese retailers exploring the U.S. market (e.g., Alibaba) (Wolf & Muhanna, ).…”

“…In essence, integrity reflects the honesty of the reviewer (Mayer et al., ). Factual, objective, and verifiable claims tend to leave the impression that the reviewers have tried to process product information accurately, have sound rules and principles when evaluating the product, and have shared their observations candidly and honestly when disclosing their reasoning process (Wu et al., ). By contrast, claims that are less rational (e.g., emotional responses) and incorporate less compelling tales (e.g., using weak logical structure) project a sense of falsification (DePaulo et al., ).…”