Numbers Speak Where Words Fail: Exploring the Effect of Online Consumer Reviews on Consumer Decision Making

Consumers are increasingly relying on online consumer reviews (OCRs) to facilitate their decision making process as a credible source of information. This study seeks to explicate why consumers deem OCRs as helpful and how they make use of OCRs in their decision making process. By drawing on Simon’s decision making model, this study posits that the two forms of OCRs (i.e., numerical ratings and opinionated reviews) facilitate consumers’ decisional processes in terms of the effectiveness of constructing consideration sets and the efficiency of arriving at a final decision. Consumers’ performance in decisional process in turn determines the justifiability of and the confidence in their decisional outcomes. To empirically test all the hypotheses proposed in this study, a field survey was conducted on users of a custom-developed online restaurant review website equipped with OCR curation features and populated with real restaurant review data. Except for two unexpected findings, all hypotheses were supported by the data analysis results. It is worth noting that, numerical rating exerts stronger positive influence on decisional process efficiency comparing to opinionated review. Furthermore, decisional outcome justifiability mediates the positive effects of both decisional process effectiveness and decisional process efficiency on decisional outcome confidence. This study contributes to both research and practice by offering a more in depth explanation to consumers’ reliance on OCRs through the lens of bounded rationality and providing excitable guidelines for enhancing the benefits of OCRs via curation features.