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How Do Novice Consumers Learn from Online Expert Reviews?

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The Ecosystem of e-Business: Technologies, Stakeholders, and Connections (WEB 2018)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing ((LNBIP,volume 357))

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Abstract

Expert-written product reviews are prevalent and could be in many forms, ranging from short textual descriptions to video-embedded blogs. For consumers, expert reviews can not only optimize their purchase decisions, but also play an important role in facilitating consumer learning. In this paper, we first draw on profession research and propose two focal elements that characterize the content of expert reviews, and then investigate the impact of expert reviews on consumers’ product preferences and information consumption via the lens of preference construction theory and dissonance theory. With describing our experiment design to test the hypotheses, we seek to make contributions to the vast studies of online reviews by characterizing the expert review content, examining the effects of expert review on consumer judgments and offering a new perspective of distinguishing expert reviews and peer reviews in online markets.

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Acknowledgement

This research is supported in part by the General Research Fund from the Hong Kong Research Grants Council (#17514516B) and the Seed Funding for Basic Research from the University of Hong Kong (#104003314).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Management and Economics, CUHK Business School, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen, China

    Zhuolan Bao

  2. Faculty of Business and Economics, The University of Hong Kong, Pok Fu Lam, Hong Kong

    Michael Chau

Authors
  1. Zhuolan Bao
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  2. Michael Chau
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Zhuolan Bao .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Bentley University, Waltham, MA, USA

    Jennifer J. Xu

  2. Oregon State University, Corvallis, OR, USA

    Bin Zhu

  3. University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT, USA

    Xiao Liu

  4. University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, USA

    Michael J. Shaw

  5. Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, USA

    Han Zhang

  6. University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA

    Ming Fan

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Bao, Z., Chau, M. (2019). How Do Novice Consumers Learn from Online Expert Reviews?. In: Xu, J., Zhu, B., Liu, X., Shaw, M., Zhang, H., Fan, M. (eds) The Ecosystem of e-Business: Technologies, Stakeholders, and Connections. WEB 2018. Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, vol 357. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-22784-5_10

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-22784-5_10

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-22783-8

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-22784-5

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