This study examines whether the effect of trust cues, such as verified purchase badges and user-provided photos, on review helpfulness differs by review extremity, on which Sagan’s standard and the theory of confirmation bias suggest contradictory predictions. Adopting large empirical data with approximately 31 million online reviews from Amazon.com, this study finds that the effect of trust cues on review helpfulness is significantly larger for moderate reviews, although the difference is negated for highly helpful reviews, and the effect is more considerable for extremely positive reviews than extremely negative reviews. The findings also disclose that the effect is more substantial for extreme reviews on search products and those on tangible products, suggesting that the differential effect depends on product attributes.

Adopting theoretical foundations of the Technology-Organization-Environment (TOE) framework and technology task fit theory, this study investigates how business managers in different management levels determine BDA use. The major findings suggest that low-level and middle-level managers decide the use of the BDA system from different perspectives. Low-level managers consider individual performance more important in their decision while the middle-level managers believe in organizational readiness and relational knowledge. Also, the relationship between data integrity and data compatibility is greater for the lower-level, while that between data timeliness and data compatibility is more substantial for the middle-level. Concerning the effect of data quality on individual performance, the middle-level perceive data compatibility and data accuracy as more important than the lower-level managers.