How People Evaluate a Product in an Online Environment: The Role of Uncertainty and Liking Feeling

Abstract

Although it is well known that travellers look at other travellers’ opinions and recommendations to plan their trips, and the number of people reviewing touristic attractions is increasing, little is known about how people judge them. Numerous studies have examined user behaviour in creating contents and participating in the online community using various methods, but research that investigates how consumers express opinions about hotel attributes is still lacking. In particular, since expressed preferences as well as ratings could be the result of both the uncertainty of consumers in evaluating an item and the liking feeling about the item (D’Elia and Piccolo 2005), the aim of this chapter is to understand the role of these components in the evaluating process, in order to segment the market and to define different users’ profile.