Disconfirmation effect on online review credibility: An experimental analysis

Abstract The rise of e-commerce has led to the increased reliance of users on electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM) to evaluate the products and services offered. Previous research has attempted to determine which reviews are more credible than others, as credible reviews tend to impact readers more than non-credible ones. However, one of the research questions in this domain that has not been addressed so far is the impact of circumstances of review writing itself, which may influence the way the review is written and affect its credibility. In this paper, we describe a controlled experiment to study the impacts of a user's exposure to past reviews and the user's own product experience on the perceived credibility of reviews written by the user. We have employed attitude-behavior linkage theories and the disconfirmation effect to study this phenomenon. Our results indicate that disconfirmation, or the difference between a user's own experience and expected experience, has a significant impact on the way a user writes reviews and hence on the review's perceived credibility with the subsequent readers of the review. We find that disconfirmation and perceived review credibility follow a U-shaped relationship, in which perceived credibility is high for the highest and lowest values of disconfirmation.