| Abstract: | Current trends on the Internet indicate an increasing supply of content from anonymous users (e.g. blogs), which may become popular among website visitors. Motivated by these Internet trends, the present study explores the tradeoffs between the source's reputation and the way content is displayed or offered on the web page as well as the effects of both on the Internet user's choice of information services. The study builds upon behavioral economics and focuses on the interaction between background and local context effects on the individual's choice. In particular, the study investigates the tradeoffs between the source's reputation, representing the background context and the provision of enriched content (e.g. source bundled with a picture or a video) representing local context. The research involved a set of experiments based on hypothetical choice or matching tasks. The main findings indicate that there are significant interaction effects between reputation and enriched content, in the form of content related pictures, video and users' recommendations, which affect the user's choice of information services. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. |
