Investigating antecedents and moderating factors of consumer's acceptance and adoption of online-received recommendations on social media: an empirical analysis

The topic of Electronic Word-of-Mouth (eWOM) has received considerable attention in both academia and among business practitioners. Yet, despite an emerging literature on the effectiveness of eWOM communication, 'the scope of published studies on the impact of eWOM communication is rather broad, and the studies appear relatively fragmented and inconclusive'. Integrating the elaboration likelihood model, network theory, and the concept of consumer innovativeness, this study focuses on the topic of 'online-received recommendations' on social media platforms. The theoretical model is then tested using partial least squares method. Based on an online survey distributed on social networks the results indicate that argument quality, perceptual affinity and information usefulness are determinants that influence the adoption of online-received recommendations. Managers can capitalise these results by designing information with a high degree of argument quality in order to enhance the perceived usefulness, thereby triggering the adoption of the information