Abstract

With the recent advances in electronic recommendation agents and social networking platforms, online review systems are becoming pervasive to transmit conventional interpersonal word-of-mouth communications to the World Wide Web. More and more online retailers have offered different opportunities for consumers to access various kinds of opinions and recommendations provided by their peers. Nevertheless, the mechanisms underlying how consumers respond to other people’s recommendations regarding a product or service offering remain equivocal. The present research is proposed to understand how consumers may attend to online peer-generated recommendations under different conditions. Based on prior research on metacognition, the present study is intended to examine how online product reviews may in part affect the subjective judgements of consumers’ own evaluations of a product and under what conditions those peer recommendations may influence consumers’ subsequent preference and choice consistency. An experiment is proposed to show that different online consumer reviews or digital word-of-mouth could have comparable impacts in changing consumers’ expressed preferences, but under some conditions, preference shifts or attitude changes induced by online peer reviews may not necessarily reflect people’s purchase intentions. Findings of the proposed research may help to obtain a better understanding of the nature of online peer recommendations and their different influences in viewers’ decision making processes.

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