LAUSR

Purpose Consumers increasingly depend on the Internet as the information source to make their hospitality decisions, which highlights the need for more research in online recommendation. Due to the globalization, culture and its effects on marketing become an increasingly important subject to investigate. Therefore, this research offers a cross-cultural investigation of consumers’ different trustworthiness and credibility perceptions when facing online recommendations from different information resources. Design/methodology/approach This research utilizes the source-credibility theory to examine consumers’ responses to online recommendations from two sources. Participants were recruited from two equivalent marketing panels in each culture. A 2 (online recommendation source: in-group vs. out-group) by 2 (culture: American vs. Chinese) between-subjects quasi-experiment was conducted to test the hypotheses. Findings The results demonstrate that culture moderates consumer responses to the two types of online ...