The impact of online reviews on renters' perceived trust in property information

Using cognitive consistency theory, we explored the mechanisms of prospective renters' cognitive processing and cognitive outcomes of reviewing rental listing information on the Internet. We conducted an eye-movement experiment with 102 prospective renters to investigate the mechanisms influencing their cognitive processing and outcomes, via a 2 (comment form: subjective, objective) × 2 (risk preference: risk avoider, risk preference) factorial design. The results show that (a) subjective reviews required more cognitive processing effort than did objective reviews, but the perceived trust level of subjective reviews was lower; (b) risk-averse (vs. risk-inclined) participants put more cognitive effort into processing listing information, but their perceived trust in the listing information was lower; and (c) participants' perceived trust in listing information was mainly influenced by the display attributes of the webpage, rather than the review information. Our results will help Internet rental companies understand tenants' information concerns and enhance their online display pages in a targeted manner.

Relationship Analysis among Apparel Brand Image, Self-Congruity, and Consumers’ Purchase Intention

Brand image has been a crucial clue to making subjective judgment for consumers to determine the brand, which is critical to making a purchase decision. The influence mechanism from apparel brand images on consumers’ purchase intention was explored for theoretical and positive analysis based on the self-congruity theory. This research first constructed a hypothetical model of apparel brand images influencing consumers’ purchase intention with self-congruity and perceived quality as mediators, in which a questionnaire was designed and conducted to test the theoretical model. The research shows that apparel brand image and perceived quality can significantly influence consumers’ purchase intention. The consumer purchase intention is directly related to clothing brand image provided self-consistency and perceived quality play an intermediary with the regulatory effect of self-motivation and brand familiarity. A positive attitude toward apparel brand image will stimulate consumers to build cognitive clues and associations between the consumers and the brand and strengthen cognitive consistency with the apparel brand’s spirit. The research results are beneficial to textile fashion and clothing enterprises to improve brand building and marketing.

Managing Customer Uncertainty in Making Service Offshoring Decisions

Despite a long-standing interest in service offshoring from both academics and practitioners, the questions how and under what conditions customers react when a well-known national brand decides to outsource its services to an offshore service provider (OSP) is an understudied area. Drawing on cognitive consistency theory, we test a new construct called, “service offshoring fit” (SOF) that captures customer overall perceptual consistency in their memory networks between the focal firm and the OSP as indicated by the suitability, appropriability, and logicality of the alliance. Using 393 responses from a panel of customers of focal brands, we show that customer certainty mediates the relationship between SOF and intention not to switch by current customers. Our findings also reveal an inverted U-shaped relationship between marketing communications and customer certainty at different levels of SOF. Specifically, if firms communicate consumers’ benefits associated with offshoring, they can mitigate or avoid negative customer reactions (and subsequently increase customer certainty); however, after a certain point, such effects are reduced.

Cognitive Authority and the Constraint of Attitude Change in Groups

Are individuals’ attitudes constrained such that it is difficult to change one attitude without also changing other attitudes? Given a lack of longitudinal studies in real-world settings, it remains unclear if individuals have coherent attitude systems at all—and, if they do, what produces attitude constraint. I argue and show that groups can endogenously produce attitude constraint via cognitive authorities. Within groups, cognitive authorities explicitly link attitudes and generate feelings of connectedness among members, thereby facilitating the interpersonal processing of attitudes. Using data on interpersonal sentiment relations and attitude changes among members of intentional communities, I find cognitive authorities constrain attitudes via two mechanisms: (1) interpersonal tensions when attitudes and sentiment relations are misaligned (i.e., balance dynamics), and (2) social influence processes leading to attitude changes that are concordant with the group’s attitude system (i.e., constraint satisfaction). These findings imply that attitude change models based exclusively on interpersonal contagion or individual drives for cognitive consistency overlook important ways group structures affect how individuals feel and think.

Anxiety, fear, and ontological security in world politics: thinking with and beyond Giddens

Research on ontological security in world politics has mushroomed since the early 2000s but seems to have reached an impasse. Ontological security is a conceptual lens for understanding subjectivity that focuses on the management of anxiety in self-constitution. Building especially on Giddens, IR scholars have emphasized how this translates to a need for cognitive consistency and biographical continuity – a security of ‘being.’ A criticism has been its so-called ‘status quo bias,’ a perceived tilt toward theorizing investment in the existing social order. To some, an ontological security lens both offers social theoretic foundations for a realist worldview and lacks resources to conceptualize alternatives. We disagree. Through this symposium, we address that critique and suggest pathways forward by focusing on the thematic of anxiety. Distinguishing between anxiety and fear, we note that anxiety manifests in different emotions and leaves room for a range of political possibilities. Early ontological security scholarship relied heavily on readings of Giddens, which potentially accounts for its bias. This symposium re-opens the question of the relationship between anxiety and subjectivity from the perspective of ontological security, thinking with and beyond Giddens. Three contributions re-think anxiety in ontological security drawing on existentialist philosophy; two address limitations of Giddens' approach.

Neighborhood Cognition Consistent Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

Social psychology and real experiences show that cognitive consistency plays an important role to keep human society in order: if people have a more consistent cognition about their environments, they are more likely to achieve better cooperation. Meanwhile, only cognitive consistency within a neighborhood matters because humans only interact directly with their neighbors. Inspired by these observations, we take the first step to introduce neighborhood cognitive consistency (NCC) into multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL). Our NCC design is quite general and can be easily combined with existing MARL methods. As examples, we propose neighborhood cognition consistent deep Q-learning and Actor-Critic to facilitate large-scale multi-agent cooperations. Extensive experiments on several challenging tasks (i.e., packet routing, wifi configuration and Google football player control) justify the superior performance of our methods compared with state-of-the-art MARL approaches.