The role of emotions and conflicting online reviews on consumers' purchase intentions

Drawing on dual-process theories, this paper explains how the systematic and heuristic information processing of online reviews with conflicting information can influence consumers' purchase decision making. The study adopts major assumptions of complexity and configuration theory in employing fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis on 680 TripAdvisor users to test the complex interrelationships between emotions and the systematic and heuristic cues used in processing reviews. The results show that the systematic and heuristic processing of online reviews can produce independent impacts on consumer decision making. Both processing routes can interact with each other to affect the domination of one route over the other. In the case of a positive-negative sequence, consumers mainly follow a heuristic processing route. In the reverse sequence, consumers' concerns about the credibility of the reviews leads them to think more deeply (systematic processing) and actively evaluate both the argumentation quality and the helpfulness of the online reviews.