Consumer Acceptance of Online Agent Advice: Extremity and Positivity Effects

Consumers often search the Internet for agent advice when making decisions about products and services. Existing research on this topic suggests that past opinion agreement between the consumer and an agent is an important cue in consumers’acceptance of current agent advice. In this article, we report the results of two experiments which show that different types of past agreements can have different effects on the acceptance of current agent advice. In Study 1, we show that in addition to the overall agreement rate, consumers pay special attention to extreme opinion agreement when assessing agent diagnosticity (i.e., extremity effect). In Study 2 we show that positive extreme agreement is more influential than negative extreme agreement when advice valence is positive, but the converse does not hold when advice valence is negative (i.e., positivity effect). We conclude by identifying promising avenues for future research and discuss implications of the results for marketers in areas such as design of intelligent online recommendation systems and word-of-mouth management on the Internet. Prior to making choices among products and services, consumers often go online to consider the advice of agents, who may be either professional critics (e.g., citysearch.com) or laypeople (e.g., all-reviews.com). As an information source, the Internet has vastly expanded the scope of pre-purchase information search by providing easy access to the advice of literally thousands of other individuals. For example, Web sites such as consumerreview.com and epinions.com have an ever-expanding database of ratings provided by actual consumers, in categories ranging from arts and entertainment to beauty care products. Such proliferation of information in the online environment creates an important problem for consumers, namely that different agents often provide contradictory