Abstract
Electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM) is a key source of information for consumers and is also a vitally important source of value to business and website owners. In this study, we investigate what causes consumers to trust or distrust a review website and how value is created (or destroyed) through online reviews, which are one type of eWOM. Building on the expectation confirmation model, this study examines how consumers’ disconfirmation of previous eWOM leads to distrust of the eWOM, which in turn leads to negative eWOM and ultimately to distrust of the review website itself. Experience-based dissatisfaction directly affects the writing of negative reviews, but only indirectly influences distrust of the website. We analyze survey data collected from users of the TripAdvisor website (n = 227), with PLS results providing support for our model. Implications exist for consumers who are users of review websites as readers of eWOM, for business owners whose products and services are reviewed online, and for review website platforms.
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Notes
Note that the traveler described in this example is experiencing two distinct types of disconfirmation. The first is disconfirmation about the expected usefulness of the eWOM – this is disconfirmation arising from an online experience. The second is disconfirmation related to expectations about the hotel – this is disconfirmation resulting from an offline, real-world experience at the hotel. The first type of disconfirmation (disconfirmation with previous eWOM) is the focus of this study. The second type of disconfirmation (disconfirmation about the quality of the hotel stay) is not included within our research model. We acknowledge that these two types of disconfirmation may be related to one another, but reserve such an exploration for future research. To reiterate, the construct in our research model is “disconfirmation with previous eWOM”.
We are assuming here that consumers are experiencing disconfirmation with positive reviews. That is, consumers form high expectations based on positive eWOM, book a hotel stay, and subsequently experience disconfirmation with those reviews after the hotel stay does not meet their eWOM-based expectations. We acknowledge the possibility that a consumer could have read negative eWOM reviews, formed low expectations, booked a hotel stay, had a positive experience at the hotel, and then experienced disconfirmation with the negative reviews. However, we are not considering such a scenario because (1) we find it highly unlikely that consumers would book a hotel stay on the basis of negative eWOM about that property, thus eliminating the possibility of experiencing disconfirmation with negative eWOM based on an unexpectedly positive hotel stay experience, and because (2) the vast majority of eWOM reviews have a positive valence, averaging approximately 4 out of 5 points or higher on the most widely-used review websites (Melián-González et al. 2013; Zervas et al. 2015), and thus the scenario of disconfirmation with widely-existing positive eWOM is more common than disconfirmation with relatively rare negative eWOM.
Note that we have not hypothesized a relationship from (dis)confirmation to (dis)satisfaction as in the ECM. This is because disconfirmation in our model is disconfirmation about the usefulness of the eWOM, while dissatisfaction is dissatisfaction with the hotel.
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Nam, K., Baker, J., Ahmad, N. et al. Dissatisfaction, Disconfirmation, and Distrust: an Empirical Examination of Value Co-Destruction through Negative Electronic Word-of-Mouth (eWOM). Inf Syst Front 22, 113–130 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10796-018-9849-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10796-018-9849-4