Ann E. Schlosser

Converting Web Site Visitors into Buyers: How Web Site Investment Increases Consumer Trusting Beliefs and Online Purchase Intentions

The authors investigate the impact of Web site design investments on consumers’ trusting beliefs and online purchase intentions. Such investments signal the component of trusting beliefs that is most strongly related to online purchase intentions: ability. These effects were strongest when consumers’ goals were to search rather than to browse and when purchases involved risk.

Locus of Control, Web Use, and Consumer Attitudes Toward Internet Regulation

The authors empirically examine how locus of control, an important consumer behavior construct, differentiates among consumers’ Web use in a marketing policy context and argue that consumers’ general expectancies as to whether they or others control events can predict their Web use and their beliefs regarding the regulation of content on the Internet. The authors test a series of hypotheses pertaining to locus of control and consumer behavior on the Internet among consumers classified as “internals” or “externals” using data collected in conjunction with the tenth WWW User Survey of the Graphics, Visualization, and Usability Center, Georgia Institute of Technology. The authors also assess scale measurement properties using single-factor confirmatory factor analysis models and test hypotheses using a correlational and structural equation modeling framework.

Anticipating Discussion about a Product: Rehearsing What to Say Can Affect Your Judgments

This research examines one aspect of the common but relatively understudied consumer behavior context of group interaction. We argue and demonstrate that the mere anticipation of group discussion can influence peoples product attitudes. This occurs because anticipating discussion shifts peoples focus toward the criteria dominating what they are mentally rehearsing to discuss. Such a shift is important because people commonly refer primarily to less important information when they explain or prepare to discuss their attitudes. Three studies demonstrate that when people are forming an attitude toward a product while anticipating discussion, this focus on less important information substantially affects peoples attitudes toward the product. As a result, depending on the evaluative implications of what is rehearsed, anticipating group discussion can lead to attitudes that are more extreme, more moderate, or similar to those of people not anticipating discussion. Moreover, when the criteria predominantly rehearsed for discussion do not represent how consumers typically evaluate the products, attitudes affected by the group-anticipation context do not correspond to product judgments made outside of the group-anticipation context. Copyright 2002 by the University of Chicago.

Who’s Driving This Conversation? Systematic Biases in the Content of Online Consumer Discussions

When consumers post questions online, who influences the content of the discussion more: the consumer posting the question or those who respond to the post? Analyses of data from real online discussion forums and four experiments show that early responses to a post tend to drive the content of the discussion as much as or more than the content of the initial query. Although advice seekers posting to online discussion forums often explicitly tell respondents which attributes are most important to them, the authors demonstrate that one common online posting goal, affiliation, makes respondents more likely to repeat attributes mentioned by previous respondents, even if those attributes are less important to the advice seeker or support a suboptimal choice given the advice seekers decision criteria. Firms “listening in” on social media should account for this systematic bias when making decisions on the basis of the discussion content.