Title: Impact of a multi-criteria rating in e-commerce: the moderating effect of self-depletion on trust and purchase intention

Authors: Virgile Schmit; Thierry Baccino

Addresses: CHART/LUTIN, Cité des sciences et de l'industrie de Paris, France ' University of Paris 8, 2 Rue de la Liberté, 93526 Saint-Denis, France

Abstract: Self-depletion is known to have a wide range of effects on the decision-making process. Two experimental studies investigate whether a purchase decision-making on an e-commerce product webpage is affected by the state of self-depletion when using a multi-criteria rating scale. A questionnaire was built to measure trust, distrust and purchase intention and was submitted to one hundred and twenty-two participants (categorised in two groups according to their self-depletion test) who have to judge different mp3 (Mpeg Audio Layer 3) players presented on a webpage. In both studies, the variance of ratings were investigated with the presence of a global rating (1st exp.) and the valence of the global rating (2nd exp.) of the products. Main results show that self-depletion moderated the effect of variance of the ratings on the judgment and also lead to a polarisation effect. Trust and purchase intention are highly correlated, while distrust is only loosely correlated to purchase intention, supporting the view of a dual trust-distrust construct, instead of a continuum.

Keywords: electronic word-of-mouth; self-depletion; trust; purchase intention; multi-criteria rating; multi-criteria decision making.

DOI: 10.1504/IJDSS.2019.103634

International Journal of Decision Support Systems, 2019 Vol.4 No.1, pp.41 - 71

Received: 27 Apr 2017
Accepted: 10 Mar 2018
Published online: 18 Nov 2019 *

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