Consumers' Acceptance of Electronic Word-of-Mouth Recommendations: Effects of Multiple Communication Elements and Processing Motivation

We present an on-going project that explores how consumers process electronic word-of-mouth (EWOM) recommendations from electronic word-of-mouth systems (EWOMS). Conceptualizing EWOMS as an informant-mediated persuasive environment that comprises of many communication elements and drawing on the accessibility-diagnosticity model and the elaboration likelihood model, we identify the critical roles of EWOM information diagnosticity and EWOM informant credibility and their antecedents in influencing consumers’ acceptance/rejection of the EWOMS recommendation. It also examines the effects of unique EWOMS mechanisms such as helpfulness indicators and informant status indicators. Taking consumer heterogeneity into consideration, the paper discusses the moderating effects of consumers’ processing motivation on the influence of information and informant characteristics and the EWOMS mechanisms. An experiment is formulated to validate our propositions.