An Empirical Research: Consumers Cope With Business Reputation Collusion

As the rapid development of e-commerce,more and more businesses are involved in the increasingly fierce competition.In the online shopping process,consumers can choose the same kind of goods,the online seller's reputation and customer reviews on the purchase intention of consumers have a significant impact,.In order to enhance the sales of goods,some bad sellers choose reputation collusion,namely,recruiting "click farmer" in the "click farming" platform,to carry out fraud transactions and publish spam review,to create a reputable,best-selling products to induce consumers.Because of their hidden nature,spam review brought by the reputation collusion are very difficult to identify,and consumers can easily see it as a real review,thus mislead their purchase decisions.Reputation collusion not only to make the potential loss of moral and interests to consumers,and resulting in "bad money drives out good".It will greatly reduce the consumer's trust in e-commerce platform,thereby affecting the overall development of e-commerce.At present,the research on the field of reputation collusion mainly focuses on the detecting system and algorithm from the perspective of computer technology.The study of consumer behavior is mainly to explore the impact of fake reviews on consumer perception and purchase intention.Although these two areas have carried out a lot of fruitful research,but the existing research is still lack of how to cope with reputation collusion(including fake reviews)behavior from the perspective of consumers.In the light of how consumer cope with business reputation collusion behavior,in this paper,we discuss the two basic characteristics of the influence of reputation collusion on consumers: hazard and inevitability.This paper constructs a theoretical model and hypothesis of consumer cope with business reputation collusion with the combination of technology threat avoidance theory and learned helplessness theory.After the validation of the structural equation model of 255 questionnaires,results show: consumers for business reputation collusion(1)perceived susceptibility,perceived severity and interaction between the two all have a positive effect on perceived severity;(2)perceived threat,safeguard effectiveness and self-efficacy each has a positive effect on avoidance motivation;(3)safeguard cost has a negative effect on avoidance motivation;(4)avoidance motivation has a positive effect on avoidance behavior;(5)perceived threat and safeguard cost each has a positive effect on learned helplessness;(6)safeguard effectiveness is not related to learned helplessness.The contribution and innovation of this study are mainly three points: first,from the perspective of consumer behavior,this paper discusses how consumers cope with the business reputation collusion behavior.On the one hand,it enriches the research of collusion detection system and algorithm.On the other hand,it enriches the research on the impact of fake reviews on consumer purchase decisions.Second,in view of the limitations of the technology threat avoidance theory,which is only used in the range of malicious software,information privacy and security software,this paper extends the theory to the recognition and response of consumers to business reputation collusion behavior.Third,the empirical research only focus on avoidance behavior of existing technology threat avoidance theory.this paper combine learned helplessness and technology threat avoidance theory,It not only improves the empirical research on the emotion-focused coping in technology threat avoidance theory,but also enriches the empirical research on learned helplessness in the field of management.At last,the results of this study provide a valuable reference for sellers,consumers and e-commerce platform managers,and also provide new thinking direction for reputation collusion research.