When Friends Give Bad Advice
Analyzing Response to Recommendation Performance of Close Others
von Carsten Leo Demming
Datum der mündl. Prüfung:2020-03-27
Erschienen:2020-04-07
Betreuer:Prof. Dr. Yasemin Boztug
Gutachter:Prof. Dr. Yasemin Boztug
Gutachter:Prof. Dr. Maik Hammerschmidt
Gutachter:Prof. Dr. Waldemar Toporowski
Dateien
Name:300420 Dissertation Demming eDiss.pdf
Size:1.35Mb
Format:PDF
Zusammenfassung
Englisch
Recommendations are common in everyday interactions of consumers and strongly impact consumption decisions. Thus, understanding the driving forces that make consumers follow recommendations is equally relevant for managers and consumer researchers. Although previous research has discussed various characteristics of recommenders that potentially affect people's willingness to accept recommendations, studies have not sufficiently examined how these characteristics interact with the utilization of information how prior recommendations of this recommender turned out (i.e, recommendation performance). Specifically, recommender characteristics such as similarity or expertise widely appear in the word-of-mouth literature, but these streams have neglected the role of recommendation performance. Likewise, research has not yet paid attention to the question of how recommender characteristics may influence the use of performance information. This is surprising because, in many recommendation situations, consumers have both, recommendation performance and inferred recommender characteristics available. The dissertation comprises three papers. In the first two papers we examine how recommendation receivers react to unfavorable outcomes that result from recommendations of close recommenders. First, we examine the joint effects of negative recommendation outcomes and relational closeness to a recommender on the intent to follow this person again (Paper 1). Second, we examine how recommendations from close others may also alter the reasoning about a service failure that has occurred after a recommendation. Specifically, we suggest that a close relationship to a recommender may influence causal reasoning and behavioral consequences after service failure in a beneficial way for this firm (Paper 2). Paper 3 is a methodological contribution that comprehensively examines mediation analysis, a group of methods that explore the causal mechanisms by which a predictor affects an outcome. This analysis is used in both empirical papers. The contribution of this dissertation is to integrate before-isolated recommender evaluation approaches and address the identified research gap by investigating whether, when and how performance of close (vs. distant) recommenders affects recommendation receivers' response differently.
Keywords: Recommendations; Recommender Evaluation; Relationship Closeness; Word-of-Mouth