Beautiful is Good and Good is Reputable: Multi-Attribute Charity Website Evaluation and Reputation Formation under the Halo Effect
Journal of the Association for Information Systems, 20 (11), pp 1611-1649, November 2019
Dong-Heon (Austin) Kwak, K. Ramamurthy, and Derek Nazareth
The halo effect has been extensively used to understand how people make judgments about quality of an object. Also, the halo effect has been known to occur when people evaluate multi-attribute objects. Although websites consist of multiple dimensions and multiple attributes, prior research in information systems has not paid much attention on how people evaluate multi-attribute websites and the types of salient halos that exist in their evaluation. Furthermore, there is little research that has investigated the formation of initial reputation toward an unknown object under the halo effect. Based on these two research gaps, the purposes of this study are to identify if there is evidence of salient halos in evaluating multi-attributes websites and to theorize initial reputation formation. To accomplish these research objectives, we introduce a framework for classifying halos based on attributes and dimensions. Also, this study employs charity websites as a multi-attribute donation channel consisting of three attributes of information content quality (mission information, financial information, and donation assistance information) and four attributes of system quality (navigability, download speed, visual aesthetics, and security). Based on the proposed framework, this study proposes four types of halos that are relevant to charity website evaluation —collective halo (attribute-to-attribute), aesthetics halo (attribute-to-dimension), reciprocal quality halo (dimension-to-dimension), and quality halo (dimension-to-dimension). The results of structural equation modeling and other analyses show evidence of the various proposed halos.