The Influence of Recommendations and Consumer Reviews on Evaluations of Websites.

Author List: Kumar, Nanda; Benbasat, Izak;
Information Systems Research, 2006, Volume 17, Issue 4, Page 425-439.
Recommendations and consumer reviews are universally acknowledged as significant features of a business-to-consumer website. However, because of the well-documented obstacles to measuring the causal impact of these artifacts, there is still a lack of empirical evidence demonstrating their influence on two important outcome variables in the shopping context: perceived usefulness and social presence. To test the existence of a causal link between information technology (IT)-enabled support for the provision of recommendations and consumer reviews on the usefulness and social presence of the website, this study employs a novel approach to generate the experimental conditions by filtering the content of Amazon.com in real time. The results show that the provision of recommendations and consumer reviews increases both the usefulness and social presence of the website.
Keywords: consumer reviews; e-commerce; perceived usefulness; personalization; recommendations; social presence
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List of Topics

#234 0.181 social networks influence presence interactions network media networking diffusion implications individuals people results exchange paper sites evidence self-disclosure important examine
#42 0.164 perceived results study field individual support effects microcomputer pressure external usefulness test psychological obligations characteristics variables indicate existence availability investigating
#118 0.153 online consumers consumer product purchase shopping e-commerce products commerce website electronic results study behavior experience b2c impact internet purchases websites
#199 0.148 reviews product online review products wom consumers consumer ratings sales word-of-mouth impact reviewers word using effect marketing helpfulness electronic commerce
#189 0.089 recommendations recommender systems preferences recommendation rating ratings preference improve users frame contextual using frames sensemaking filtering manipulation specific collaborative items
#13 0.059 personalization content personalized willingness web pay online likelihood information consumers cues customers consumer services elaboration preference experiment framing customized timing