HYPOTHESES
As mentioned, consumers who consult but do not follow the recommendation (CNF) should have a more
complex shopping behavior than consumers who do not consult an online product recommendation (NC)
because they have more information to process. CNF should also have a more complex shopping behavior
than consumers who consult and follow a product recommendation (CF) because the recommendation
provided does not match their preferred alternative. This mismatch increases the decision difficulty
(Fitzsimons and Lehmann, 2001). Online, CNF should visit and revisit more web pages, including
product detail pages, than NC and CF when shopping online for a product. This complex navigation
pattern will lead CNF to display a navigation pattern that is less linear than NC and CF. By visiting and
revisiting more pages, CNF should follow a greater number of all the available links on a website. Thus,
their navigation pattern should also be more densely connected (i.e., compact). By visiting and revisiting
more pages, CNF should spent more time making their decision than NC and CF. Finally, CNF should
spend more time on the web pages they visit since their decision difficulty is greater than for NC and CF.
The following hypotheses are posited to reflect the different shopping behaviors between NC and CNF
and between CF and CNF.