title: Extrinsic Information Cues for Mitigating Information Asymmetry in e-Commerce: A German-Chinese Perspective
Creators: name: Brand, Benedikt M.
Publisher: name: University of Bayreuth
Year: 2022
Subjects: subject: extrinsic information cues
subject: information asymmetry
subject: e-commerce
subject: online shopping
subject: intercultural
subject: country-of-origin
subject: online customer reviews
subject: quality seals
subject: 330

description: The emergence of e-commerce opened up various benefits for retailers and consumers alike, including the possibility to purchase products from across the world. However, the information asymmetry inherent to online shopping impedes consumers to entirely inspect these products before they are delivered. To mitigate this information asymmetry and thereby reducing the number of product returns, several information cues can serve as signals indicating higher/lower quality. Such information cues encompass (inter alia) online customer reviews, quality seals, and/or information about products’ country of origin, whereby their interaction is assumed to affect their individual importance. Since the way consumers cognitively process such information and their interplay varies based on consumers’ cultural background, this dissertation aims at answering the following research question: How are different extrinsic information cues affecting the online purchase of Chinese and German consumers in an e-commerce context? Additionally, this dissertation seeks to provide a methodological contribution by examining a methodology capable of analyzing the impact of multiple information cues on online purchase decisions simultaneously. Hence, the Adaptive Choice-Based Conjoint (ACBC) analysis will be contrasted with its methodological antecedent Choice-Based Conjoint (CBC) analysis to enlighten where the advantages and disadvantages for applying one or the other are situated. After introducing this dissertation’s topic in more detail and providing the theoretical backgrounds for (i) the information cues of interest in an e-commerce context as well as (ii) how different cultural backgrounds affect information processing, a total of six papers intend to answer the research questions. More precisely, paper #1 explores the country of origin effect in an e-commerce context for German low- and high-involvement products from a Chinese consumer’s perspective by taking into account recent findings in country of origin research. In paper #2, the impact of one country of origin dimension (country-of-manufacture) is compared to the influence of online customer reviews based on surveying German and Chinese consumers. Moreover, ACBC’s advantages and disadvantages are juxtaposed to the ones related with CBC investigations. Making use of the ACBC and two of its major benefits (‘summed price’ approach and Calibration section), paper #3 is the first to measure the willingness to pay for sustainable clothing by applying this more realistic methodology. Apart from that, the importance of quality seals and country-of-manufacture are analyzed depending on consumers’ green ori-entation. Paper #4 then explores the same information cues for consumers from Generation Z and X. Focusing on online customer reviews, papers #5 and #6 investigate online customer reviews’ credibility among German and Chinese consumers. While paper #5 examines the effect of video versus purely textual online customer reviews, paper #6 highlights cultural differences and scrutinizes how online customer review components are cognitively processed between German and Chinese consumers. In the last chapter, the dissertation concludes with new insights gained and outlines the derived practical implications.