How E-Consumers Integrate Diverse Recommendations from Multiple Sources

While numerous prior studies have extended our knowledge of the impact of recommendations and decision-making strategies on e-Consumers’ purchase process, few have empirically investigated how e-Consumers integrate diverse recommendations from multiple sources. Relying on cognitive dissonance theory and signaling theory, this study postulated that consistency between diverse recommendations could be a key factor for integration and followed an exploratory approach using protocol analysis to determine how e-Consumers utilize and integrate recommendation diversity. We identified two underlying approaches (explorationdriven and confirmation-driven), each with two strategies — fit-based and consistencybased — that could provide a theoretical foundation to investigate recommendation diversity. The consistency-based strategy is a new concept and it is being applied to the context of recommendation diversity. Eliciting consistency between recommendations from multiple sources would be beneficial for e-Commerce websites because consistency reduces dissonance in consumers and facilitates the purchase process.