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1. Introduction
An online shopping market study (CNNIC, 2016) showed that electronic word-of-mouth, price and website/business's reputation were three key factors for online shopping decision-making in China, with the attention level of information reaching 77.5, 72.2 and 68.7% respectively. Electronic word-of-mouth has become the most important factor for online shoppers, whereas online product reviews also have turned into a major form of electronic word-of-mouth. However, the research on the quality of the information in e-commerce has been traditionally focused more on the quality of the websites, the quality of the information provided by the websites and its impact on user satisfaction (Danniswara et al., 2017; Li et al., 2017; Lim and Ting, 2012). More consideration was given to the ease of use, the response and design of the websites or whether the websites can provide clear, useful, up-to-date and accurate information.
A new challenge faced by online stores is that more and more users have turned their attention from the information presented by the shopping website to online reviews provided by third-party buyers. Consumers are increasingly relying on online reviews to make purchase decisions (Chakraborty, 2019; Chen and Chang, 2018; Huang et al., 2019). Also, current researches on information quality are mostly limited to the evaluation of information from e-commerce websites. Objective and scientific evaluation of the information quality of online reviews has been an important but difficult issue in both academic and practical fields. The difficulty is mainly attributed to that the information quality of online reviews is often perceptual and fragmented. When different online shoppers read the same online reviews, they will have various feelings and perceptions about the information quality of these reviews.
With the above-mentioned new challenge and difficulty in mind, this study is about using a new lens to examine the relationship between online reviews and purchase intention by applying the stimulus-organism-response (S-O-R) framework (Mehrabian and Russell, 1974). By introducing the construct of perceived information quality and social presence of online reviews as stimuli, trust and satisfaction as organisms, and purchase intention as response, the study aims to verify a new model by considering the mediating effect of trust and satisfaction and the moderating effect of emotional polarity.
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