Impact of web personalization of online word of mouth on buyers' decision process: An experimental study

This study evaluates the impact of personalization of review summaries on consumer's buying decision and cognitive efforts. Following a quasi-experimental procedure we tested two hypotheses pertaining to online buyers' decision process. Our results show that personalized review summary significantly reduces the information processing effort and information requirements of those who received personalized review summaries as compared to those who did not. This study thus contributes to e-commerce literature on online buyer behavior and recommender systems strategy.