Consumer’s Electronic Word-of-Mouth Adoption: The Trust Transfer Perspective

ABSTRACT

Consumers’ trust in the source of an online review message is largely determined by the consumers’ trustworthiness beliefs about the source that can potentially influence their willingness to engage in a transaction. While extant research examined consumer trust in a message source (i.e., a reviewer), little attention has been paid to the role of trust transfer within the review platform in forming source trustworthiness perceptions in the electronic word-of-mouth (e-WOM) context; source trustworthiness refers to the extent to which the composer of a review message deserves trust. It is the primary aim of this research to understand how trust transfer between related targets affects a consumer’s assessment of online reviews. We empirically examined consumers’ e-WOM adoption mechanism from the trust transfer perspective. We constructed a conceptual model based on the elaboration likelihood model and the trust transfer theory, and we tested the model using data collected from an online survey conducted on TripAdvisor.com. The findings revealed that trust is transferred from the review site to the community of reviewers, and then to a specific reviewer, but not directly from the review site to a specific reviewer. It was also found that consumer trust in a specific reviewer and review helpfulness both contribute to review adoption. This study offers some implications from these findings.

KEY WORDS:

• AND PHRASES: Consumer trust
• e-WOM
• online reviews
• online trust
• source credibility
• trustworthiness
• trust transfer

Acknowledgments

This research was supported in part by a grant from Korea Research Foundation (Research Project No. 2017S1A5A2A01023463).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jieun Lee

JIEUN LEE ([email protected]) is a full professor of marketing in College of Business and Economics at Chung-Ang University, Seoul, South Korea. She received her Ph.D. in consumer sciences from Purdue University. She was a visiting scholar at UCLA. Her research interests include consumers’ e-WOM behavior on social networking sites, social media marketing, and consumer-brand relationship. Dr. Lee has published in Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking; International Journal of Information Management; Sustainability; and other journals.

Ilyoo B. Hong

ILYOO BARRY HONG ([email protected]; corresponding author) is a full professor of management information systems in College of Business and Economics at Chung-Ang University. He earned his Ph.D. in MIS from the University of Arizona. He was a visiting scholar at the UCLA Anderson School of Management. His research interests include building online consumer trust, consumers’ e-WOM assessment, and information disclosure on social networking sites. Dr. Hong has published in such journals as Decision Sciences, Information & Management, and International Journal of Information Management, among others. He also presented at numerous international conferences, including the Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences.