The Effects of Amount, Quality, and Presentation Order of eWOM on Consumer Perceptions and Purchase Intentions: Experiments on Negative Internet Reviews

The quick growth and fast spread of eWOM have created a new threat to Internet merchants and marketers: online paid reviewers flood product and service reviews to confuse and deter competitors’ customers. This phenomenon is called the “Internet Water Army Attack” (IWAA). This study examined the effects of the posts by online paid reviewers. To gain a better understanding of the phenomenon, the research designed three experiments respectively to investigate the effects of the amount, quality, and presentation order of eWOM on consumers’ perceptions and decision making. The results of this study confirmed with some previous research that online marketing is threatened by negative WOM. That is, IWAA can effectively increase a target customer’s risk perceptions of a product and lower his purchase intention.