A FORK IN THE ROAD: A CONCEPTUAL MODEL OF ONLINE CONSUMER ITERATIVE SEARCH

Lower searching cost and access to large amounts of information on the Internet are making a consumer’s search more iterative. Through a synthesis of literature from consumer behaviour and information science, we propose a process model of online consumer search in which a consumer may move forward in the process towards a final product selection, but also is likely to backtrack to an earlier stage to revise their search. Our process model steps through a consumer’s need, search criteria, alternatives, evaluation, and final selection, including an option of iteration within the evaluation stage. Future research will fully investigate the entire process model, but in this paper we focus on the evaluation stage and the resulting search iteration. In the online context, as a consumer evaluates alternative products, the consumer is also engaged in a learning process where the consumer may identify the need to update the functional product attributes and/or the hedonic product attributes of the search criteria or alternatives, which leads to a new iteration of the search process. The product consumption goals of a consumer (i.e., prevention, promotion) are theorized to also influence the search process leading to iteration. Hypotheses and future research opportunities are outlined

Unraveling the “paradox of the active user”: Determinants of individuals’ innovation with it-based work routines

As individuals become more experienced with information technologies (ITs), they become limited by well-learnedbehavioral routines for using an IT, which act to inhibit innovation. This “paradox of the active user” can prove problematicfor organizations, which derive benefits when organizational ITs are used to their fullest potential. Thus, to advance researchon individual differences and post-adoption use behaviors, this research-in-progress develops a research model examining therelationships among habit, IT mindfulness, and embeddedness of an IT-based routine on individuals’ innovation with IT.Identifying factors that foster or inhibit individuals’ attempts to innovate with ITs can provide actionable guidelines fordesigning managerial interventions to manage and maintain desired levels of user-initiated innovation in the post-adoptivecontext

Price Comparison, Price Competition, And The Effects Of ShopBots

Two ShopBots were used to determine high-to-low price dispersion for identical models of 25 consumer durables, in 2007 and again in 2011, revealing substantial but declining price dispersion ratios. A survey of 1,135 American online shoppers revealed their dependence on ShopBots and frequency of other online shopping actions. Typical respondent reported they "very often" used search sites to locate what they wanted. Nearly 30 percent used the most often named price comparison site, Yahoo! Shopping, in the past year, suggesting substantial potential for future price rationalization. Several customer relationship management tools online merchants might use to avoid the resulting direct price competition are discussed. Finally, the impact of m-commerce, tablets, and apps on online price comparison behavior is explored

Online Price Dispersion Revisited: How Do Transaction Prices Differ from Listing Prices?

Price dispersion of a homogeneous product reflects market efficiency and has significant implications on sellers’ pricing strategies. Two different perspectives, the supply and demand perspectives, can be adopted to examine this phenomenon. The former focuses on listing prices posted by sellers, and the latter uses transaction prices that consumers pay to obtain the product. However, no prior research has systematically compared both perspectives, and it is unclear whether different perspectives will generate different insights. Using a unique data set collected from an online market, we find that the dispersion of listing prices is three times higher than the dispersion of transaction prices. More interestingly, the drivers of price dispersion differ significantly between listing and transaction data. The dispersion of listing prices reflects sellers’ perception of market environment and their pricing strategies, and it may not fully capture consumer behavior manifested through the variation of transaction prices. Our study indicates that the difference in perspectives taken on the online prices yields different results as to their dispersion

DOES THE AUGMENTATION OF SERVICE LEVEL AGREEMENTS AFFECT USER DECISIONS IN CLOUD ADOPTION SCENARIOS? – AN EXPERIMENTAL APPROACH

Despite the benefits of cloud computing, customers are reluctant to use cloud services as they have concerns about data security and privacy. Many of these concerns arise due to the lack of transparen-cy. Consequently, bridging the existing information asymmetry and, thus, fostering trust in the cloud provider is of high relevance. As service level agreements are an important trust building factor and due to their technical and complex nature, the augmentation of these is promising. Therefore, we in-vestigate the effects of augmenting service level agreements (by means of augmented browsing) on the ease of the information gathering process and simultaneously on perceived information overload, comprehension and transparency in a web-based experiment. The results of our online experiment do not confirm our assumed positive effects of augmentation. Nonetheless, we show that the ease of gath-ering information about a cloud service positively influences the perceived trustworthiness. Further-more, we demonstrate that the perceived trustworthiness of a cloud computing provider largely deter-mines the intention to use its services. Thus, besides improving security, cloud providers not only have to communicate trust-critical information but also have to identify suitable measures of information provisioning that considerably improve transparency while lowering information overload

Seeking Information Using Search Engines: The Impact of Negation on Judgments

We examine how online searches lead to judgment formation in two contexts where statements are negated differently. In one context, a statement (of the form “if P then Q”) is negated using “not” (as in “if P then not Q”), while in the other context, it is negated using a different term or phrase (as in “if P then R”). We show that online searches to find information about the validity of this statement generate different results in these contexts. Our findings contribute to extant work on online searches by suggesting that when individuals test the validity of a statement using search engines, their searches lead to categorically different results contingent on the search context. From a practical standpoint, we make recommendations to search engine developers and content providers so online searches generate more inclusive results

A Classification and Investigation of Trustees in B-to-C e-Commerce: General vs. Specific Trust

Existing literature lacks a common taxonomy and systematic integration necessary for building cumulative knowledge on the nature of trust in an information systems context. Hence, this article explores online trust’s multidimensional nature within the context of online stores. This article develops a framework for classifying trust dimensions and to investigate their influences on behaviors in new and familiar business-to-consumer (B-to-C) e-commerce environments. Specifically, we classify trust dimensions into two levels: general trust (beliefs toward the general e-commerce environment and infrastructure) and specific trust (beliefs regarding a specific e-commerce shopping experience). Specific trust is further delineated into trust in the merchant and trust in the technology artifact, i.e., the website. The integrative framework was tested in two separate empirical studies using e-commerce stores that were either new or familiar to the subjects. The results show that general trust mechanisms are important to consumers in a new e-commerce environment. In contrast, when shopping in a familiar e-commerce store, consumers pay more attention to the current Web experience, diminishing the salience of general trust. This article contributes to the literature by developing an integrative framework of trust and by providing insights into the influences of trust dimensions on purchase decisions in new and familiar e-commerce environments

Comparative Study of Online and Offline Shopping: A Case Study of Rourkela in Odisha

The study tries to recognize that, how consumer measure channels for their purchasing. Specifically, it progresses a conceptual model that addresses consumer value perception for using the internet shopping versus the traditional shopping. Earlier study showed that perceptions of price, product quality, service quality and threat strongly impact perceived value and purchase intents in the offline and online network. Observations of online and offline buyers can be evaluated to see how value is constructed in both channels. It is hitherto to recognize what factors influence online and offline shopping choice progression. The objective of this study is to provide an impression of online shopping decision process by comparing the offline and online decision making and identifying the factors that motivate customers to decide whether to do online shopping or go for the offline shopping. Consumer’s shop when and where they want, where they are comfortable with the products and the choice of shopping. The study finds that female are more into online shopping than male. Since last two years as population are more aware of the technology the online shopping increased immensely. The people from the age group 35 and above are less likely to do online shopping because they are less aware of the technology. However the respondent said that they will love to purchase from online shopping if only the price of the product is less than the market. They revealed that it is fairly important to go for e-shopping