Social responses to lifelike characters can significantly alter human evaluations of technology. This study tested the differences between a picture of an on-screen character interacting in three different contexts (retail purchase, health advice, reading survey) versus a three-dimensional robot conducting the same interactions off screen. A laboratory experiment (n=72) was conducted in the US ...

Electronic word of mouth is available to customers in different types of online consumer reviews, which can be used to help them make e-commerce purchasing decisions. Customers acknowledge that online consumer reviews help them to determine eWOM credibility and to make purchasing decisions. This study uses surveys and multiple regression analysis to create an extended Elaboration Likelihood Mod...

The growth of the web has led to a shift in the news industry and the emergence of novel news services. Due to the importance of news media in society it is important to understand how these systems work and how they are perceived. Previous work has ranked news systems in terms of their openness to user contribution, noting that the most open systems (such as YouTube) are typically not viewed a...

Data from 574 participants were used to assess perceptions of message, site, and sponsor credibility across four genres of websites; to explore the extent and effects of verifying web-based information; and to measure the relative influence of sponsor familiarity and site attributes on perceived credibility.The results show that perceptions of credibility differed, such that news organization w...

This paper owes a great deal to Doug Laxton. We also thank Phil Lowe, Glenn Stevens and participants in a seminar at the Reserve Bank of Australia for helpful comments. The views expressed in this paper are those of the authors and not necessarily those of the Reserve Bank of Australia. Use of any results from this paper should clearly attribute the work to the authors and not to the Reserve Ba...

The aim of this study is to investigate the factors that determine the local people of Sabah (also known as Sabahan) bank customers’ intention to use mobile banking. This study extends the applicability of the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) to mobile banking and includes “perceived credibility”, “perceived enjoyment” and “perceived selfefficacy”, in addition to “perceived usefulness” and “pe...

Although previous studies indicate that perceived similarity can influence perceptions of source credibility, less is known about the impact of ethnic identity on these perceptions in social media environments. A quasi-experiment was designed to manipulate the strength of ethnic identity of an African American spokesperson promoting a health news story. The results indicate a substantive condit...

This study examines the use of blogs as a means of tourism marketing communication. Using a scenario-based approach, an on-line experiment was conducted to test whether consumers perceive corporate and personal blogs to be credible sources of information and to compare the perceived credibility of blogs to that of traditional wordof-mouth. The findings suggest that while consumers do not genera...

Grounded in Media System Dependency theory, this article investigates the impact of new media on political efficacy. It suggests that dependence on online resources affects people's perceptions about the democratic potential of the Internet. Using structural equation modeling, the study tests the relationship between political attitudes and the perceived utility of the Web. The analysis employs...

The impact of social and cultural factors on the adoption of technology still requires much research. To investigate it more fully, we examine the reasons for the adoption and non-adoption of mobile banking in Ghana. Through a survey of 271 people in Ghana, it has been found that social and cultural factors in the form of perceived credibility, facilitating conditions, perceived elitisation and...