The Influence Of Information-Seeking Strategies On Uncertainty In Electronic Commerce

Online consumer behavior is inherently uncertain given that consumers cannot completely predict the consequences of online transactions. Although uncertainty has been widely considered as one of the primary barriers to online transactions, most previous studies only view it as a contingent conditional variable or a background mediator without sufficiently investigating its causes and change mechanism during online consumers'transaction decision-making process. This research will therefore investigate the antecedents of uncertainty. It aims to help researchers and practitioners comprehend the function of transaction uncertainty more deeply in electronic commerce (EC).In this study, we investigate the effect of information from four groups of information-seeking strategies (passive, active, extractive and interactive), categorized by the Uncertainty Reduction Theory (URT) and the Computer-mediated Communication (CMC) Information-seeking Strategies Model (ISSM). This is applied to online consumers'perception of uncertainty when initially transacting with an unknown online store in an online marketplace in China. Also, two contextual factors will be integrated, namely, information consistency and seller reputation, originating from Kelly's Attribution Theory (KAT), to explore their direct influences and interactive effects with information from different information-seeking strategies on the perception of transaction uncertainty.An online survey is used to collect data from the three most prestigious online store marketplaces in Mainland China; the statistical results strongly support the theoretical model. Our research has a series of new findings: 1. We find in Chinese C2C transaction, in general, online consumers will mainly depend on the transaction information acquired from extractive and interactive information-seeking strategies to shape their transaction uncertainty perception, these findings are not completely consistent with the declaration of URT and ISSM, this indicates in such a research context, these two theories only can be partially supported. 2. We find the two contextual factors, information consistency and seller reputation,originating from KAT, have distinct interactive effects with the information from the four groups of information, specifically, we find they can separately interact with information from interactive information-seeking strategies (two-way interaction), meanwhile, they can jointly interact with information from active or extractive information-seeking strategies; these findings confirm the KAT's declaration that the contextual factors can have co-varies with the obtained information, furthermore, we clarify the exact configuration of these co-varies thus further confirm and reify the KAT's selective co-varies deduction. 3. We find the KAT's two contextual factors, only information consistency can directly affect the online consumers'uncertainty perception, but seller reputation cannot, these findings are not completely consistent with previous research's finding which is conducted in western countries, it indicates that Chinese online consumers may have a unique cognition style compared with the western counterparts.Based on these new findings, we then discussed the probable reasons, and the theoretical and practical implications also be proposed. We believe the findings of this research would be instructive for EC and IS researchers to further understand the internal mechanism of transaction uncertainty. In addition, it will allow practitioners of IS and EC to adopt valid and effective measures to help consumers reduce the perception of uncertainty in consumer-to-consumer (C2C) transaction processes.