Abstract
Rating-based summary statistics have become ubiquitous, and of key relevance to compare offers on booking platforms. Largely left unexplored, however, is the issue to what extent the descriptives of rating distributions influence the decision making of online consumers. In this work a conjoint experiment was eye-tracked to explore how different attributes of these rating summarisations, such as the mean rating value, the bimodality of the ratings distribution as well as the overall number of ratings impact users’ decision making. Furthermore, participants’ maximising behavioural tendencies were analysed. Depending on their scores on Decision Difficulty, participants were guided by different patterns in their assessment of the characteristics of rating summarisations, and in the intensity of their exploration of different choice options.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsNotes
- 1.
- 2.
Note, that the original, outdated, phrase Renting a video[..] in the scale of [31] in the present research was replaced with Booking a hotel[..].
- 3.
The implementation of the platform is downloadable at: https://github.com/ludovikcoba/rankBasedConjoint.git.
References
Werthner H, Alzua-Sorzabal A, Cantoni L, Dickinger A, Gretzel U, Jannach D, Neidhardt J, Pröll B, Ricci F, Scaglione M, Stangl B, Stock O, Zanker M (2015) Future research issues in it and tourism. Inf Technol Tour 15(1):1–15
Xiang Z, Magnini VP, Fesenmaier DR (2015) Information technology and consumer behavior in travel and tourism: insights from travel planning using the internet. J Retail Consum Serv 22:244–249
Law R, Qi S, Buhalis D (2010) Progress in tourism management: a review of website evaluation in tourism research. Tour Manag 31(3):297–313
Gretzel U, Yoo KH (2008) Use and impact of online travel reviews. In: O’Connor P, Höpken W, Gretzel U (eds) Information and communication technologies in tourism 2008, pp 35–46, Vienna, Springer Vienna
Xie KL, Zhang Z, Zhang Z (2014) The business value of online consumer reviews and management response to hotel performance. Int J Hosp Manag 43:1–12
Xiang Z, Qianzhou D, Ma Y, Fan W (2017) A comparative analysis of major online review platforms: implications for social media analytics in hospitality and tourism. Tour Manag 58:51–65
Xie H (Jimmy), Miao L, Kuo P-J, Lee B-Y (2011) Consumers responses to ambivalent online hotel reviews: the role of perceived source credibility and pre-decisional disposition. Int J Hosp Manag 30(1):178–183
Knijnenburg BP, Willemsen MC (2011) Each to His Own: how different users call for different interaction methods in recommender systems. In: Proceedings of the 5th ACM conference on recommender systems - RecSys ’11, pp 141–148
Payne JW (1976) Task complexity and contingent processing in decision making: An information search and protocol analysis. Organ Behav Hum Perform 16(2):366–387
Bettman JR, Luce MF, Payne JW (1998) Processes, constructive consumer choice, source. J Consum Res 25(3):187–217
Simon HA (1955) A behavioral model of rational choice. Q J Econ 69(1):99–118
Schwartz B, Ward A, Lyubomirsky S, Monterosso J, White K, Lehman DR (2002) Maximizing versus satisficing: happiness is a matter of choice. J Personal Soc Psychol 83(5):1178–1197
Jugovac M, Nunes I, Jannach D (2018) Investigating the decision-making behavior of maximizers and satisficers in the presence of recommendations. In: 26th conference on user modeling, adaptation and personalization (UMAP’18)
Zwerina K, Huber J, Kuhfeld WW (1966) A general method for constructing efficient choice designs. Durham, NC: Fuqua School of Business, Duke Univesrsity, 39–59
Zanker M, Schoberegger M (2014) An empirical study on the persuasiveness of fact-based explanations for recommender systems. CEUR Workshop Proc 1253:33–36
Glaholt MG, Reingold EM (1985) Eye movement monitoring as a process tracing methodology in decision making research 4(2):125–146 (1985)
Orquin JL, Loose SM (2013) Attention and choice: a review on eye movements in decision making. Acta Psychologica 144(1), 190–206:9
Rao VR (2008) Developments in conjoint analysis. In: Handbook of marketing decision models, pp 23–53. Springer
Chung J, Rao VR (2012) A general consumer preference model for experience products: application to internet recommendation services. J Market Res 49(3):289–305
Coba L, Zanker M, Rook L, Symeonidis P (2018) Exploring users’ perception of collaborative explanation styles. In: 2018 IEEE 20th conference on business informatics (CBI), pp 70–78
Coba L, Zanker M, Rook L, Symeonidis P (2018) Exploring users’ perception of rating summary statistics. In: Proceedings of the 26th conference on user modeling, adaptation and personalization, UMAP 18, 353–354. ACM, New York, NY, USA (2018)
Coba L, Zanker M, Rook L, Symeonidis P (2018) Decision making of maximizers and satisficers based on collaborative explanations. arXiv preprint arXiv:1805.11537
Hu N, Zhang J, Pavlou PA (2009) Overcoming the J-shaped distribution of product reviews. Commun ACM 52(10):144
de Langhe B, Fernbach PM, Lichtenstein DR (2016) Navigating by the stars: investigating the actual and perceived validity of online user ratings. J Consum Res 42(6):817–833
Pfister R, Schwarz KA, Janczyk M, Dale R, Freeman JB (2013) Good things peak in pairs: a note on the bimodality coefficient. Front Psychol 4:700
Fuchs M, Zanker M (2012) Multi-criteria ratings for recommender systems: an empirical analysis in the tourism domain. In: Lecture notes in business information processing, vol 123 LNBIP, pp 100–111
Jannach D, Zanker M, Fuchs M (2014) Leveraging multi-criteria customer feedback for satisfaction analysis and improved recommendations. Inf Technol Tour 14(2):119–149
Holmqvist K, Nyström M, Andersson R, Dewhurst R, Jarodzka H, Van De Weijer J (2011) Eye tracking. Oxford University Press, A comprehensive guide to methods and measures
Sauro J, Lewis JR (2010) Average task times in usability tests. In: Proceedings of the 28th international conference on Human factors in computing systems - CHI ’10, p 2347, New York, New York, USA, 2010. ACM Press
Schwartz B, Ward A, Monterosso J, Lyubomirsky S, White K, Lehman DR (2002) Maximizing versus satisficing: happiness is a matter of choice. J Perso Soc Psychol 83(5):1178
Nenkov GY, Morrin M, Ward A, Schwartz B, Hulland J (2008) A short form of the maximization scale: factor structure, reliability and validity studies. Judgm Decis Mak 3(5):371–388
Acknowledgement
The authors would like to acknowledge Gabriela Boyadjiyska for supporting the eye-tracking experimentation as part of her thesis project.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2019 Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this paper
Cite this paper
Coba, L., Zanker, M., Rook, L. (2019). Decision Making Based on Bimodal Rating Summary Statistics - An Eye-Tracking Study of Hotels. In: Pesonen, J., Neidhardt, J. (eds) Information and Communication Technologies in Tourism 2019. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-05940-8_4
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-05940-8_4
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-05939-2
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-05940-8
eBook Packages: Business and ManagementBusiness and Management (R0)