| According to CNNIC, the total user scale of ecommerce platforms of China has achieved 361 millions by the end of 2014, a 19.7 percentages increase on the year of 2013. It means that online shopping market will soon embrace a high-speed development. However, the blossom of web shopping also brings headaches. On World Consumer Rights Day of 2016, CCTV’s annual "3.15" show reported the scandals of click farming on online shopping platforms like taobao.com, jd.com and dianping.com, which made a stir in China. When people shop online, there are too many options for one certain commodity, and in such scenarios, online product reviews play a key role in eliminating consumers’uncertainty, decreasing their buying risks and making their final decisions. That is why online retailers occasionally manipulate customer reviews, make false propaganda in review contents and lure people to choose their products, which greatly distracts consumers from having accurate cognition on the real product. This phenomenon also causes unfair competition among online stores by increasing their manipulation cost. Although online review manipulation has been a common practice in ecommerce industry for a very long time, relative research is still very limited and lagged behind. Customers cognition and coping behaviors towards manipulative reviews calls for more empirical research in deep.Based on prior literatures, this paper proposed persuasion knowledge coping model to study online reviews manipulation. We performed two investigates. Study 1 certified that manipulative reviews increase purchase intention indeed, and customers having different judgments for reviews hold different levels of purchase intention. Study 2 researched how online reviews effect customers persuasion coping behaviors, and we also looked into the mediating effect of persuasion knowledge. Once again, that customers having different judgments for reviews hold different levels of coping strategy got proved.Our research provides implications to both online consumers and ecommerce platforms. The introduction of persuasion knowledge model to online review manipulation study will benefit scholars from a new direction for their research. |
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