October 27, 2011, Professor Zhang Han, Georgia Institute of Technology, gave an academic report to SME faculty and students: "Is Bad always Stronger than Good? Revisiting Negativity Bias in the Formation of Online Consumer Trust".

　　Professor Zhang Han introduced in simple terms his latest research on the uncertainty in e-commerce and customer satisfaction. Professor Zhang divided trust into three factors, Trustworthiness, Trust and Purchase Intention (PI), and that Trustworthiness will affect the Trust, Trust will affect the PI. On this basis, Professor Zhang decomposed comment into two categories: Competence and Integrity related, and the study focused on whether negative comments have greater influences than positive comments. Meanwhile, Professor Zhang organized two experiments with more than 120 participants to test hypothesis on the influence intensity of integrity & competence related negative reviews on the Trust factors.

 

Speaker Profile:
　　Professor Zhang Han received Ph.D. on Management Information Systems from the University of Texas at Austin, in 2000. Now is Helen and John Taylor Rhett, Jr. Associate Professor (with tenure) in the Georgia Institute of Technology School of Management., and serve as the Area Coordinator in the information technology management area. His research focuses on networks of trust and credibility, online payments and the evolution of electronic markets. Published papers in Information Systems Research, Journal of Management Information Systems, Decision Support Systems and other academic journals. He is now an editorial board member of Decision Support Systems, Electronic Commerce Research and Applications (ECRA), Pacific Asia Journal of the Association for Information Systems, and an editorial review committee member of Journal of Database Management.