When Seeing Helps Believing: The Interactive Effects of Previews and Reviews on E-Book Purchases

Abstract

For many products, particularly digital content, consumers base purchase-related decisions on not only others’ evaluations (e.g., online reviews) but also their own direct experiences (e.g., previews). Many of them therefore combine “seeing” through their own encounters with “believing” the assessments of others, often being confronted with a situation wherein the former contradicts the latter. This study investigates the dynamics underlying the interactive relationships between online reviews and previews to shed light on how consumers collectively use these pre-buying resources as guidance in purchasing e-books. Our research reveals that consumers wisely leverage previews in accordance with the characteristics of reviews (e.g., volume, valence, and variance). The positive effects of previews increase with decreasing review volume and average valence. Consumers also rely heavily on previews in situations wherein a high variance exists among the indirect evaluations of reviewers. We detect the presence of order effects with respect to exposure to previews and reviews; exposure to previews after accessing reviews more effectively drives sales than when exposure to reviews precedes the encounters. These results provide content providers with useful managerial insights into how they can maximize consumers’ overall prepurchase experiences and enhance content sales through the excellent leveraging of previews and reviews.

Governance and Design of Digital Platforms: A Review and Future Research Directions on a Meta-Organization

“…Several studies have provided evidence on how digital platforms can design an effective feedback system to evaluate complementor performance (Bolton, Greiner, & Ockenfels, 2013;Jolivet, Jullien, & Postel-Vinay, 2016;Lin, Zhang, & Tan, 2019;Yi, Jiang, Li, & Lu, 2019). For example, digital platforms ranging from Amazon to Taobao to eBay provide various feedback mechanisms in the form of reputation scores (Fan et al, 2016;Li, Fang, Lim & Wang, 2018), online ratings, and reviews (Choi, Cho, Yim, Moon & Oh, 2019;Li & Wu, 2018;Lu, Ba, Huang & Feng, 2013;Qiu, Gopal & Hann, 2017), wherein customers can share their personal experience and opinions about complementors' product offerings. Complementors receiving a great deal of negative feedback are deemed to be of low-quality and may be downplayed by platform owners; this also works the other way round on customers.…”

Building the Momentum: Information Disclosure and Herding in Online Crowdfunding

“…Table 3 summarizes the description and the summary statistics of our key variables. For variables that are right-skewed, we add 1 and then log-transform them to deal with the hyperdispersion property before estimations (Choi et al 2019.…”

“…For variables that are right‐skewed, we add 1 and then log‐transform them to deal with the hyper‐dispersion property before estimations (Choi et al. 2019, Ho et al. 2017).…”

Seeing is believing? The impact of air pollution on corporate social responsibility

“…CEOs who experience fatal disasters without extremely negative consequences lead firms that behave more aggressively, whereas CEOs who witness the extreme downside of disasters behave more conservatively. In a study of digital content products, Choi, Cho, Yim, Moon, and Oh (2019) report that consumers' purchase decisions depend partly on their direct experience of trying the products in addition to the related reviews. Essentially, individuals experience significant changes their attitude after personally experiencing specific events.…”