Do Customers Always Rely on Opinion Leaders’ Behavior to Make a Decision? The Moderating Role of Customer Expertise

Abstract

Customers often learn from opinion leaders through a social learning process before making decisions. Despite many studies on social learning, the role of individual characteristics (e.g., customer expertise) in the social learning process is not clear. In this study, we examine the moderating role of customer expertise (i.e. refers to the extent to which an individual perceives himself/ herself to be knowledgeable, competent, trained, and experienced) on the relationship between opinion leaders’ behaviour (i.e., rat-ing behaviour and purchase behaviour) and customer decision (i.e., customer purchase decision and customer review decision). Based on information conformity and social learning ..