Lower searching cost and access to large amounts of information on the Internet are making a consumer’s search more iterative. Through a synthesis of literature from consumer behaviour and information science, we propose a process model of online consumer search in which a consumer may move forward in the process towards a final product selection, but also is likely to backtrack to an earlier s...

Research on electronic commerce has shown that information provided by online retailers, such as product recommendations and consumer reviews, have a significant impact on consumer product choice (Dellarocus 2006, Duan et al. 2008, Fleder and Hosnagar 2008, Lynch and Ariely 2000). However, few studies have considered the timing of the consideration and choice process. In this study, we analyze ...

This article examines the potential theoretical and practical contributions that thin-slice judgments may offer to consumer psychology. We begin by exploring thin-slice judgments in the context of existing consumer information processing research. Then, we discuss the antecedents of thin-slice judgments, the type of processing that may underlie and impact thin-slice judgment formation. Finally,...

E-commerce consumers are facing increasingly complex purchasing decisions. Due to their cognitive capacity, however, consumers may not always achieve their goal of optimal product choice. Existing research has focused on providing aids to consumers to help them make rational and conscious information choices for complex purchasing decisions. Recently, a dual-process Unconscious Thought Theory (...

While interest in biomedical question answering has been growing, research in consumer health question answering remains relatively sparse. In this paper, we focus on the task of consumer health question understanding. We present a rule-based methodology that relies on lexical and syntactic information as well as anaphora/ellipsis resolution to construct structured representations of questions ...

The Library of the Health Sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago obtained a grant from the Illinois State Library to implement a statewide demonstration project that would provide consumer health information (CHI) using InfoTrac's Health Reference Center CD-ROM database. The goals of the project were to cooperate with targeted public libraries and clinics in providing CHI at the earl...