Who needs trust when you know everything? Dealing with information abundance on a consumer-review Web site

Authors

  • Andrew Michael Duffy Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information, Nanyang Technological University

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v21i7.6313

Keywords:

Trust, consumer review sites, TripAdvisor, perceived homophily, information abundance

Abstract

Ideas about trust have been based on information scarcity. To overcome the uncertainty associated with choice, people gather information; when that is not enough, they turn to trust in order to make a decision. Consumer-review Web sites offer information abundance, however, which demands a re-evaluation of the function of trust under such circumstances. This study uses a survey to investigate the role of trust in the traveller review site TripAdvisor. It uses five concept pairings — two measurements of experience using the site, two forms of uncertainty, two mechanisms of information-seeking, two forms of trust and two behavioural outcomes — to explore how trust operates amidst information abundance. It proposes that while consumer-review Web sites overcome primary uncertainty (risk of making a poor choice) by providing information, they produce a secondary uncertainty (inability to assess all options) based on concerns about processing the mass of information efficiently. This study finds that trust plays a role in reducing both primary and secondary uncertainty, but not in decision-making. It proposes that trust may be subsumed into information seeking on information-abundant consumer-review Web sites, and discusses implications for how trust is understood and what it means for effective reviewer sites.

Author Biography

Andrew Michael Duffy, Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information, Nanyang Technological University

Andrew Duffy is an Assistant Professor in the Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information at Nanyang Technological University. His research interests include communication in travel and tourism both in print and online; digital forms of journalism; and how the next generation of journalists is adapting to the digital media ecosystem.

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Published

2016-06-22

How to Cite

Duffy, A. M. (2016). Who needs trust when you know everything? Dealing with information abundance on a consumer-review Web site. First Monday, 21(7). https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v21i7.6313