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產品受歡迎資訊與網路購物：以消費者解讀為干擾變數
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1. Introduction: Popularity Information in E-Commerce
The emergence of the Internet has enabled e-businesses to carry much wider
selections of products, including products that suit mainstream tastes (Broad-appeal
Products) and those that serve a small niche of the market (Narrow-appeal Products). That
is, online purchase has become a new choice for consumers (Shih, Chang, and Peng,
2002). Furthermore, e-businesses can display the most up-to-date sales volume next to
every product (including both broad- and narrow-appeal products) at a relatively low cost.
Thus, it has become common to see the information of sales volume (actual sales
accumulated from prior consumers) and breadth of appeal (potential sales conducive to
consumers’ preferences) co-existing in e-commerce, while this is difficult to achieve in the
traditional sales channels due to limited space and high cost (Brynjolfsson, Hu, and Smith,
2010). However, most prior research merely focuses on the effect of single source of
popularity information (e.g., sales volume) on consumer purchases (Cai, Chen, and Fang,
2008; Chen, 2008), concentrating on the underlying signal, mainly quality inference. To
our knowledge, only a few recent studies have started to examine the joint effect of
different types of popularity information and reveal countervailing results from the
previous research (Tucker and Zhang, 2011). Thus, this research intends to explore further
in this direction and examine how the congruency of different types of popularity
information impact consumers’ online purchase behavior with consumers’ interpretation as
the moderator.
Classic research in popularity information found that consumers tend to infer the
sales volume as an indicator of quality and believe higher popularity indicates better
product quality (Anderson and Holt, 1997; Celen and Kariv, 2004; Chen, 2010; Duflo and
Saez, 2003). Based on the same quality inference, Tucker and Zhang (2011) argued that
higher sales volume may not necessarily signal better quality and lead to stronger
purchase intention. They suggested that consumers may infer the signal differently
corresponding to two types of popularity information: sales volume and breadth of appeal,
which are jointly considered and the signals conveyed by these two types of information
are incongruent. Typically, it is congruent to see a broad-appeal product have a higher
sales volume than a narrow-appeal product, whereas it is incongruent to see a narrow-
appeal product have an equally high or higher sales volume than a broad-appeal product.
Their research results showed that, with an equally high sales volume, consumers infer
greater quality for a narrow-appeal product than for a broad-appeal product based on the
assumption that the potential customer base of a narrow-appeal product should be much