eWOM and Docility: The Restaurant Decision-making Process

Abstract

showing how information shared through EWOM were much more effective than commercial information and they made consumers change their mind in their eating out decisions. To test hypothesis an experiment simulating the eating out behaviour of consumers was used.

434 Italian students took part to it. Different scenarios characterized by high and low customers satisfaction were presented to respondents; half of the students were presented both commercial information and Trip advisor reviews, half acted as a control group. Z-scores were used to test for docility. SEM was used to identify variables affecting.

EWOM in the form of Tripadvisor reviews had such a strong power to make people docile up to the point of changing their mind although before, after reading commercial information, they would have shown a different behaviour. EWOM was more useful than commercial information in influencing consumers' decisions, in every scenario, however EWOM was more trustworthy than commercial information when they have the same valence and more informative when their information quality is low. Among factors influencing docility usefulness was the variable mediating the impact of trustworthiness on docility; trustworthiness does not have a direct impact on docility.

The paper contributes to improving the understanding of EWOM role in the decision-making process, and in particular it explores how powerful EWOM is in making people change their mind in their eating out decisions, i.e. showing strong docility.