Through four essays, this dissertation contributes to the body of marketing literature by advancing understanding of consumer interactions with digital decision aids. Different aspects of the content contained within digital decision aids are explored in several contexts. First, the drivers of consumer interactivity in an online review community are examined and it is found that violations of community norms are an important factor in stimulating consumer action. Second, a tool is developed to facilitate the normalization of online review content across languages. Next, elements of language and national culture are investigated to determine their influence on consumer reviews in an international context. It is found that cultural biases play an important role in the relative verbosity, valence, and helpfulness of online reviews across countries. Lastly, the role of images in digital decision aids is considered and it is found that image type and perspective can influence consumer product evaluation. In sum, the influence that content and context have on consumer interactions with digital decision aids is clearly demonstrated through a diverse yet intertwined set of studies. / Business Administration/Marketing

According to previous studies, a higher degree of processing fluency leads to higher liking; however, other studies indicate that a higher degree of processing fluency leads to lower recognition. This experiment examines the influence of processing fluency on both liking and recognition to determine if the same results occur when participants are asked to rate liking and remember images. Subjects rated a series of images by level of liking, then were given a recognition test. The stimuli were a combination of fluent and disfluent product images with varied fluency in each of four categories: Amount of Information, Figure-Ground Contrast, Clarity, and Symmetry. Results indicated that participants liked fluent images more than disfluent images. However, results also revealed a trend that recognition may have been higher for fluent images, and that the effects of fluency on recognition depended on which type was manipulated. Thus, the effects of varying processing fluency are different when participants are asked to both rate liking and remember items. This experiment aims to provide successful marketing tactics, suggesting that marketers make their products fluent in order to produce greater liking and memory.