Persuaded to Buy: A Study on the Influence of Peer Pressure and Expert Opinion on Purchase Intention

Online review websites have features like review helpfulness and expert opinions that aid in consumers’ decision-making process. Extant studies have yet to compare and combine these features to ascertain their relative efficacies. The purpose of this study is to investigate how purchase intention is affected by three factors, namely: peer pressure, expert opinions, and a combination of peer pressure and expert opinion. A between-participants experiment was carried out among 427 participants to test the persuasive effectiveness of the three combination factors on purchase intention. Two major results can be gleaned from the experiment. First, all three factors were effective in causing attitude shifts in purchase intention with combined factors being more effective than single factors. Two, the attitude shift in purchase intention from positive to negative was easier than that from negative to positive.