Internet users’ decision bias: Order effect in e-commerce

Abstract

Most internet users were exposed to a large amount of information pieces when they were surfing the
Internet. It is interesting to understand whether the same series of information presented in different
order result in different judgments? Thus, the objective of this study is to examine the influence of
information presentation order on the Internet users’ decision making (an order effect). Further, some
of the decision makers form their decisions immediately after they find any pieces of information (a
Step-by-Step procedure), while for some Internet users the judgment was made once all the information
has been collected (an End-of-Sequence procedure). It is expected that the Internet users’ response
mode would moderate the order effect and thus was also examined in current study. Two experiments
were conducted in which different amount of information pieces were included. There are two pieces of
information in experiment 1 and four information pieces were included in experiment 2. The result
indicated significant order effects from both experiments. In addition, participants who were asked to
follow a Step-by-Step procedure revealed recency effect while End-of-Sequence procedure produced no
order effect. Finally, response mode has significant influence on the participants’ attitude when the
amount of information pieces increased. The results from current study can provide practical
implications regarding how to design the information presentation sequence to create more favorable
consumer responses.