Start Date

12-13-2015

Description

Information quality (IQ) plays a critical role in ecommerce consumers’ purchase decisions, and product-related user-generated content (PUGC) is an increasingly important source of information. Nevertheless, vendors currently do not take full advantage of PUGC since PUGC is mainly used for evaluation purposes. Integrating PUGC into earlier phases of the purchase-decision process might be promising. However, little is known about which dimensions of IQ consumers evaluate as being most important in different phases of the purchase process. To close this gap, we design a survey study that investigates the perceived relative importance of various IQ dimensions in each of three purchase phases (i.e., screening, filtering, and evaluation). Conceptually, we thus extend the concept of IQ to a dynamic approach. Practically, our findings can inform the design of ecommerce websites that integrate PUGC about how to best support the purchase-decision process with respect to dynamic IQ.

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Dec 13th, 12:00 AM

A Dynamic Approach to Information Quality in User-Generated Content

Information quality (IQ) plays a critical role in ecommerce consumers’ purchase decisions, and product-related user-generated content (PUGC) is an increasingly important source of information. Nevertheless, vendors currently do not take full advantage of PUGC since PUGC is mainly used for evaluation purposes. Integrating PUGC into earlier phases of the purchase-decision process might be promising. However, little is known about which dimensions of IQ consumers evaluate as being most important in different phases of the purchase process. To close this gap, we design a survey study that investigates the perceived relative importance of various IQ dimensions in each of three purchase phases (i.e., screening, filtering, and evaluation). Conceptually, we thus extend the concept of IQ to a dynamic approach. Practically, our findings can inform the design of ecommerce websites that integrate PUGC about how to best support the purchase-decision process with respect to dynamic IQ.