How buyers perceive the credibility of advisors in online marketplace: review balance, review amount and misattribution

In an online marketplace, buyers rely heavily on reviews posted by previous buyers (referred to as advisors). The advisor’s credibility determines the persuasiveness of reviews. Much work has addressed the evaluation of advisors’ credibility based on their static profile information, but little attention has been paid to the effect of the information about the history of advisors’ reviews. We conducted three sub-studies to evaluate how the advisors’ review balance (proportion of positive reviews) affects the buyer’s judgement of advisor’s credibility (e.g., trustworthiness, expertise). The result of study 1 shows that advisors with mixed positive and negative reviews are perceived to be more trustworthy, and those with extremely positive or negative review balance are perceived to be less trustworthy. Moreover, the perceived expertise of the advisor increases as the review balance turns from positive to negative; yet buyers perceive advisors with extremely negative review balance as low in expertise. Study 2 finds that buyers might be more inclined to misattribute low trustworthiness to low expertise when they are processing high number of reviews. Finally, study 3 explains the misattribution phenomenon and suggests that perceived expertise has close relationship with affective trust. Both theoretical and practical implications are discussed

How do you feel when you see a list of prices? the interplay among price dispersion, perceived risk and initial trust in Chinese C2C market

The issues of trust fraud, product genuineness and price dispersion jointly make Chinese C2C buyers difficult to identify trustworthy sellers with a low price. Little is known about the generation of initial trust when buyers search products and receive lists of widely ranged prices. This study proposes a theoretical model to explain how price dispersion interacts with other factors in C2C purchase, such as initial trust, perceived risk, perceived value and purchase intention. Product type is considered as a moderator. 261 students were invited in a survey-based experiment. The results from PLS analysis show that price dispersion negatively affects perceived value, whilst, positively affects perceived risk, which further influences perceived value negatively. Price dispersion also negatively influences initial trust through perceived risk. Moreover, the negative effects of price dispersion are stronger when buyers purchase high-touch products

Comparison of operation room staffs and patients perspectives from “patient privacy” in the operating room

Background and aims: Privacy is one of the fundamental human rights and its consideration during health care is required and caused to maintain dignity and trust between the nurse and patient. This study was performed with the aim of investigateing the privacy of patients in the hospital operating room of Shahrekord University of Medical Sciences from the view of the staff and patients. Methods: This research was a decscriptive-analytic study. 38 operating room personnel and 88 patients who had surgery were selected by census and simple random sampling. Data were collected by a questionaire made by researcher. Data were analyzed using SPSS software with chi-square and t- test. Results: The results showed paying respect to privacy in physical dimention was considered from the standpoints of operating room personnel 62.9, the researcher's observations 60.7 and patients 78.9. Paying respect to privacy has been estimated in social dimension from the view of staff and patients’and the researcher's observation 4, 11, and 5.3, respectively. Paying respect to privacy was considered from informational dimension, from the staff, patients’, and researcher's observations views 54.2 and 79.5, respectively. In total, the results showed there was significant relationship between paying respect to privacy and gender so that more precent of patients stated having no paying respect privacy in physical dimension (P=0.022). Conclusion: Therapy personel and researcher’s observations due to awareness of legal and ethical rules in this regard evaluated paying respect patient’s privacy in the low level. It is obvious to pay more attention personnel and authorities to moral standards in patient care

Complexity or simplicity? Designing product pictures for advertising in online marketplaces

In online marketplaces, many sellers highlight product and service information directly within product pictures for advertising purposes. Such a strategy increases the visual complexity of the picture and provides more information to support buyers’ judgment. However, when other sellers adopt the same method, a given picture will not be conspicuous enough to be noticed. To address this issue, the concept of complexity contrast is introduced. No prior attention has been paid in literature to the interplay between visual complexity and complexity contrast. This research proposes a theoretical model to explain the influences of visual complexity and complexity contrast on buyers’ pleasantness in shopping, while perceptual and conceptual fluency act as mediators. Results from a lab experiment suggest an entangled effect of complexity contrast and visual complexity, indicating that buyers are influenced more by the conspicuousness of a product picture, rather than the information conveyed by a product picture when it is visually overwhelming

The State of the Art in Trust and Reputation Systems: A Framework for Comparison

We introduce a multidimensional framework for classifying and comparing trust and reputation (T&R) systems. The framework dimensions encompass both hard and soft features of such systems including different witness location approaches, various reputation calculation engines, variety of information sources and rating systems which are categorised as hard features, and also basic reputation measurement parameters, context diversity checking, reliability and honesty assessment and adaptability which are referred to as soft features. Specifically, the framework dimensions answer questions related to major characteristics of T&R systems including those parameters from the real world that should be imitated in a virtual environment. The proposed framework can serve as a basis to understand the current state of the art in the area of computational trust and reputation and also help in designing suitable control mechanisms for online communities. In addition, we have provided a critical analysis of some of the existing techniques in the literature compared within the context of the proposed framework dimensions

Determining the Optimal Reporting Strategy in Competitive E-marketplaces

In a reputation system for multiagent based electronic marketplaces where the number of high quality products provided by good selling agents is unlimited, buying agents often share seller information without the need to consider possible utility loss. However, when those good sellers have limited inventory, buyers may have to be concerned about the possibility of losing the opportunity to do business with the good sellers if the buyers provide truthful information about sellers, due to the competition from other buyers. In this paper, we propose an adaptive mechanism built on a game theoretic basis for buyers to determine their optimal reputation reporting strategy, by modeling both the competency and willingness of other buyers in reporting seller reputation and strategically choosing reporting behaviours that maximize their utility according to the modeling results. The results of the experiments carried out in a simulated competitive e-marketplace confirm that our proposed mechanism leads to better utility for buyers in such an environment

Estimating the Effect Of Exercising On Users’ Online Behavior

This study aims to estimate the influence of offline activity on users’ online behavior, relying on a matching method to reduce the effect of confounding variables. We analyze activities of 850 users who are active on both Twitter and Foursquare social networks. Users’ offline activity is extracted from Foursquare posts and users’ online behavior is extracted from Twitter posts. Users’ interests, representing their online behavior, are extracted with regards to a set of topics in several subsequent time intervals. The shift of users’ interests across different time intervals is taken as a measure of user behavior change on the social network. On the other hand, we employ user check-ins at a gym or fitness center as a sign of exercise and consider it to be an offline activity. In order to find the effect of exercise on online behavior, we identify users who did not go to the gym for at least two months but did so at least nine times in the next three months. We show that shift in interest reduces significantly for users after they start exercising, which implies that the offline activity of exercising can influence how users’ interests are shaped and change on the social network over time