Who do you trust: the expert or the user? The effect of review valence on purchase intention and the role of gender and receiver expertise

This study aims to find out to what extent review valence has an impact on purchase intention. Gender and receiver expertise are used as moderators in this study. In the literature there is quite a lot written about the influence of online reviews on purchase behaviour. In the literature researchers began by exploring WoM before the age of the internet had arrived. Since the internet is around starting 1993 researchers have increasingly started looking at E-WoM and how it impacts consumer behaviour. Studies have looked at the subject from various angles. Different researchers have used different methods and have also used different variables to test the effect. In the literature many findings suggest that review volume has an impact for user reviews, but not per se for critic reviews. Review valence has an impact on purchase intentions or sales when it is written by a critic. In the literature there is no consensus however on the role of review valence. This study aims to solve that gap in the literature by looking at valence. This study specifically aims to find out whether critic reviews or user reviews have a bigger impact as that is one of the items almost undiscussed in the literature. Many studies were field studies which makes it difficult to control for the various variables that might influence the outcome. This study will use an experimental between-subjects design to find this out. By using an experimental design this study is able to manipulate variables to check for a causal relationship while controlling for other variables. The outcome of this study suggests that there is no significant effect between review valence and purchase intention. Moreover, there also does not seem to be a moderation effect by gender and by receiver expertise. These outcomes contradict prior literature which suggested that volume had an effect on purchase behaviour for user reviews and that valence did impact purchase behaviour for critic reviews. The literature on gender and receiver expertise also pointed in the direction of there being a significant effect, there is however not a lot discovered about these two variables in this context, in particular compared to the amount of literature available on volume and valence. Future research should focus more on the difference between critic and user reviews, the customer journey of buying a ticket and try to find a valid measurement for receiver expertise. For gender future research should try to focus more on online reviews and purchase behaviour as most of the literature on gender has focussed on other aspects of E-WoM.