The Study Of Contradictory Online Reviews On Consumers' Ambivalent Attitudes And Purchase Intentions

In recent years,scholars have been paying increasing attention to online reviews.Previous studies about the impact of affective tendencies on consumer perception mainly focus on the type of online review on a particular affective tendency,such as positive comments or negative comments.However,it ignores the impact of comments on consumers,which contain both positive and negative information or positive and negative comments exist at the same time.With the e-commerce platform aware of the importance of online reviews,several online shopping platforms have provided consumers with the chance of Appended Online Review.Inconsistencies with First-time Online Reviews and Appended Online Reviews are more prevalent and the contradictory nature of the online reviews are more pronounced.At present,there are relatively few studies on the contradictions of online review.The studies about the contradictory online reviews mainly focus on the Appended Online Reviews that the emotional orientation of the First-time Online Reviews and Appended Online Reviews are inconsistent.However,in the real shopping environment,consumers face a huge amount of commentary data and the type of online reviews paradox is more complicated.Contradictory online reviews can be divided into four types on the basis of two dimensions:product attributes and commentator source.From the perspective of attribution theory,we explored the differences in effects of different types of contradictory online reviews on consumers'ambivalent attitudes and purchase intentions.In experiment,college students and graduate students are selected as the analysis object.The contradictory review data was obtained from online retail sites Tmall as comment sample.In this study,experimental data were collected using situational experiments,and the data was analysed by paired samples T tests,analysis of variance and regression analysis through SPSS statistics 22.0.The conclusions are as follows.Firstly,any contradictory online review reduces consumers' positive attitude and increases the negative attitude and level of ambivalence.In addition to contradictory comments on the same attribute and from different commentators,the other three types of contradictory comments have a significant impact on ambivalent attitudes.However,any two types of contradictory online reviews don't show any significant difference in the effect on ambivalent attitude.Secondly,compared with the contradictory online reviews for different attributes,contradictory online reviews for the same attribute are more likely to be attributed to the product itself rather than the reviewers.Consequently,contradictory online reviews for the same attribute plays a more significant role in reducing the positive attitude and enhancing the negative attitude,leading a smaller range of ambivalent attitudes.Thirdly,regarding the contradictory online reviews for the same attribute,the reduction of amplitude by a positive attitude and the increase in amplitude by a negative attitude are more significant and the range of ambivalent attitudes is smaller when the reviews are from the same reviewers than when they are from different reviewers.However,the effect is contrary for the contradictory online reviews for different attributes.Fourthly,an initial positive attitude and an eventual positive attitude have a significant positive effect on purchase intentions,and an ultimately negative attitude has a significant negative influence on purchase intentions.This study has shown that the effects of different types of contradictory online reviews on consumers' ambivalent attitudes and purchase intentions are different.On the one hand,it serves as a supplement for research on contradictory online reviews.On the other hand,enterprises can make strategies from four aspects:strengthening the management of contradictory online reviews,making rational use of the impact of attribution on consumer ambivalent attitude,making full use of consumers' "first impressions",and arousing the enthusiasm of consumers'comments and improving the quality of comments.Therefore,enterprises can improve consumer willingness to purchase by making full use of the effect of online reviews on consumer purchase decisions.At the same time,it provides guidance for e-commerce platform to optimize the attribute tags of reviewing system.