查看文章

Reviews are often accompanied by additional auxiliary-information such as information about the reviewer (eg, if the reviewer is a novice or expert) or review generation process (eg, if the reviewer was paid to write the review). In this research, we investigate when and why uncertainty induced by auxiliary-information will and will not carry over to adversely impact consumers’ evaluations of reviewed products. This is important because UGC reviews can be useful to consumers when evaluating products. However, concerns regarding reviewer trustworthiness often undermine the utility of UGC reviews. Thus, this research investigates the processing of UGC reviews under uncertainty, and when and why its adverse effect on judgments is mitigated. Despite extensive research on source credibility in the context of persuasive communications (eg, Sternthal, Dholakia, and Leavitt, 1978; Kang and Herr 2006) and WOM (eg, Herr, Kardes, and Kim, 1991), little is known about the role of uncertainty in consumers’ processing of UGC reviews. Though it is obvious that uncertainty regarding source trustworthiness should result in information discounting, it is unclear when and why this will not occur. This is important because source-related uncertainty undermines review usefulness. We theorize that metacognitive processing of source-related uncertainty can determine when it will adversely impact judgments. Such processing entails thinking about or elaborating on uncertainty (ie, doubting one’s doubts). We propose that merely thinking about uncertainty, can mitigate its adverse effect on product evaluation.