Factors of Information Credibility for an Internet Advice Site

Abstract

Information credibility is important to Internet advice site vendors because they primarily build a revenue stream based on how credible consumers consider the information on the website. Unless consumers believe the website's information is credible, they are not likely to be willing to act on the advice. This paper reports on an empirical study of how individual differences and initial site impressions affect perceptions of website information credibility. Results confirm that most of the proposed individual difference and initial impression variables play an important role in how consumers view the credibility of an unfamiliar website. Implications are included regarding adapting websites to take into account initial site impressions and individual differences.

Argument form and spokesperson type: The recommendation strategy of virtual salespersons

“…As previously discussed, customers are not likely to act on the RA's recommendation if they do not regard it as credible (McKnight & Kacmar, 2006). Customers who are convinced by the credibility of the recommendation will be encouraged to look differently at the subject to which it refers (Alexander, Fives, Buehl, & Mulhern, 2002).…”

“…H 1a . Customer perceptions of the argument quality will be arrayed as CDB > CDW > CO. McKnight and Kacmar (2006) have asserted that information credibility is essential to Webstore operation: customers who do not believe the credibility of the Webstore's information are not likely to act on the RA's recommendations. As a system's credibility can be established via evidence of how a recommendation has been derived (Wang & Benbasat, 2007), customers' perceptions of the source credibility of a RA may be strengthened if additional justification of how the recommendation has been developed and why customers should believe in it were added to the claim proposed in the RA recommendation.…”

Online information quality and consumer satisfaction: The moderating roles of contextual factors – A meta-analysis

“…For example, it rose from 1.2 zettabytes (1.3 trillion gigabytes) in 2010 to 1.8 zettabytes in 2011, growing by a factor of 9 in just five years [32]. The plethora of information available online raises concerns regarding its quality [81,83,108]. Many researchers [e.g., 83,108] have raised issues regarding the quality of online information as there are no general standards for posting online information, and as such, information may be easily plagiarized, altered, or created under inaccurate pretenses [82,83,108,79].…”

Attitude towards Mobile Advertising and Mobile Web Information Acquisition Behaviour: Perspectives from the Advertising Value, Credibility and Self-efficacy

“…Credibility is critical for the formation of attitude towards mobile advertising and also has a major impact on online buying patterns (Goldfarb and Tucker 2011) [8]. The virtual Internet makes it more difficult to build advertising credibility (McKnight and Kacmar 2006) [9] especially in mobile web context which has led to a host of recent credibility studies.…”

“…Credibility of an advertisement refers to the perceived truthfulness and believability of advertising (MacKenzie & Lutz, 1989) [9]. Advertising credibility has been found to have a direct positive effect on the evaluation of customers (Choi et al, 2002) [15].…”