Cross-Review Incoherence and Purchase Deferral

This paper focuses on inconsistency among a set of reviews and explores how, why, and when the presence of cross-review incoherence influences consumers’ purchase deferral—their likelihood of making a “buy/not buy” decision immediately after consulting the reviews or deferring it until after obtaining more information. Based on the cognitive dissonance theory, we hypothesize that (a) the presence of cross-review incoherence or attribute-level contradictions among a set of reviews leads to lower certainty in consumer attitudes and a higher likelihood of purchase deferral, (b) this effect transpires through consumers’ helpfulness and credibility evaluations of the review set, and (c) the effect of cross-review incoherence on review set evaluations is weakened when the specificity of the context behind reviewers’ opinions is high. We conducted two experiments and found support for these predictions.