Information Display on E-Commerce Platforms

Abstract:

This thesis examines how information displays shape user decision-making across different stages of the consumer journey on e-commerce platforms. While online marketplaces increasingly rely on visual and textual cues to guide consumers, the psychological and behavioral mechanisms through which these displays influence judgments remain insufficiently understood. To address this gap, the dissertation investigates two critical yet distinct contexts: pre-purchase product evaluation and post-purchase dispute resolution, where information design plays a defining role in shaping user responses, platform efficiency, and market outcomes.

Essay I investigates how visual diversity in pre-purchase product displays, specifically model body-size diversity in online fashion retail, influences consumers’ purchase intentions. Despite the growing adoption of diverse model representations, brands remain uncertain about when diversity enhances or undermines consumer responses. Through controlled experiments, this essay demonstrates that the impact of body-size diversity is culturally contingent and psychologically nuanced. Body-size diversity increases purchase intention in individualistic cultural contexts by enhancing perceived inclusion but decreases it in collectivistic contexts due to reduced perceived attractiveness and diminished inclusion. These effects are further moderated by consumers’ subjective body image and gender: females with lower body satisfaction or higher perceived resemblance to models respond more strongly to diversity cues, whereas males’ evaluations remain comparatively stable. This essay develops a dual-pathway framework by highlighting inclusion-based and aesthetic-based evaluations to explain the mixed findings in visual persuasion research and to offer practical guidance on when retailers should standardize or localize diversity strategies.

Essay II shifts to the post-purchase stage and examines how informational cues shape judgment quality in crowd-judged dispute resolution systems, an increasingly central component of platform governance. Although platforms commonly use rule prompts to encourage more deliberative and accurate decision-making, the effectiveness of these interventions remains unclear. This essay theorizes and empirically tests the diagnosticity of the information environment as a contextual moderator of rule prompting. Using a between-subjects experiment simulating platform disputes, it shows that rule prompts improve accuracy and strengthen rule-based reasoning only when no diagnostic cues are available. When platform-provided cues strongly support the correct outcome, rule prompting increases deliberative effort but yields limited accuracy gains; when cues are misleading, rule prompting fails to induce deeper analytic processing and offers little accuracy improvement despite increasing rule-related language use. These results clarify the cognitive mechanisms underlying mass decentralized adjudication and challenge the assumption that rule prompting uniformly enhances decision quality.

Together, the two essays offer a unified theoretical perspective on how information displays can either facilitate or distort user decision-making at different points in the e-commerce lifecycle. This thesis advances understanding of how users interpret complex information environments and how platforms can design more effective, context-sensitive interventions. The findings hold important implications for global retailers, platform designers, and policymakers seeking to balance inclusivity, user autonomy, and governance efficiency in digital marketplaces.