Internet usersʹ decision bias: Order effect in e-commerce

Most internet users were exposed to a large amount of information pieces when they were surfing the Internet. It is interesting to understand whether the same series of information presented in different order result in different judgments? Thus, the objective of this study is to examine the influence of information presentation order on the Internet usersʹ decision making (an order effect). Further, some of the decision makers form their decisions immediately after they find any pieces of information (a Step-by-Step procedure), while for some Internet users the judgment was made once all the information has been collected (an End-of-Sequence procedure). It is expected that the Internet usersʹ response mode would moderate the order effect and thus was also examined in current study. Two experiments were conducted in which different amount of information pieces were included. There are two pieces of information in experiment 1 and four information pieces were included in experiment 2. The result indicated significant order effects from both experiments. In addition, participants who were asked to follow a Step-by-Step procedure revealed recency effect while End-of-Sequence procedure produced no order effect. Finally, response mode has significant influence on the participantsʹ attitude when the amount of information pieces increased. The results from current study can provide practical implications regarding how to design the information presentation sequence to create more favorable consumer responses.