The Effect Of Dispersion In Online Word Of Mouth In Multi-dimensional Online Rating

With the rapid development of internet technology,China's E-commerce model represented by B2C,B2B,C2C has been developed rapidly in just a few years.When consumers use the E-shopping website,they can browse the product information displayed by the merchants and the product word-of-mouth information published by the consumers.Online word-of-mouth has become an important information source for consumers to make online shopping decisions,and post-purchase review module has become a necessary and very important operational module for each shopping website.At the same time,with the widespread use of social media,the UGC(user-generated content)grows rapidly,and inconsistent evaluation(both negative evaluation and positive evaluation)for the same product is more and more.In contrast to a large body of recent WOM research examining individual product ratings,ratings volume,and central tendency,little work has focused directly on dispersion.Moreover,small collections of studies incorporating dispersion have revealed positive,negative,and inconclusive effects.These conflicting findings suggest the presence of important moderators worthy of investigation.Previous research on word-of-mouth dispersion has found that high word-of-mouth dispersion has a negative impact on product sales,while others have found that it has a positive impact on product sales.We believe that there are conflicting research conclusions,because the previous scholars did not in-depth analysis of the impact of different attribute scores on products,that is,ignore the root causes of the formation of word-of-mouth dispersion.Combined with the actual situation that the current online shopping website mostly adopts multi-dimensional scoring system,this paper introduces product multi-attribute scoring,perceived risk and perceived uniqueness to explain the past seemingly conflicting conclusions.Through an empirical data study and two experimental studies,we verified the hypothesis.Firstly,the experiential product hotel was selected as the research object,and the online rating data of nearly 2000 hotels were obtained by using web crawler.The results of data analysis showed that the dispersion of word-of-mouth distribution significantly affected hotel sales,the impact of product attribute score on sales was also significant,and the interaction between the dispersion of word-of-mouth distribution and attribute score was significant.Secondly,experiment 1 introduces two mediator variables,perceived risk and perceived uniqueness,and divides the product attribute score types.Results of empirical and laboratory study indicate that WOM dispersion can stimulate consumer risk perception to reduce purchase intention,whereas WOM dispersion can stimulate consumer personalized perception to increase purchase intention.The dominated-attribute type of product plays a significant moderating role in the main effects.In the Utilitarian Dominance(Hedonic Dominance)conditions,higher WOM dispersion will stimulate higher(lower)personalized perception and lower(higher)risk perception,thereby increasing(reducing)purchase intention.Additionally,consumers' ambivalence attitude can moderate the moderation effect of the rating of product attributes.