Beschreibung:
There is an interesting phenomenon that although some enterprises weren’t responsible for the product-harm crises, they were seriously damaged due to the wide spread of negative crisis information, especially the growth of social media spurring the spread of misinformation. Our study intended to fill an important gap by uncovering a novel role of source credibility of negative crisis information. Through a series of five studies, our findings provided strong empirical evidence that source credibility of negative crisis information inversely correlated with purchase intentions and positively correlated with attributions of responsibility. Furthermore, our findings demonstrated the underlying mechanism that crisis severity moderated the effects of source credibility on attribution and attribution mediated the effect of source credibility on purchase intentions. This research had substantive practical implications for companies involved in product-harm crises in proactively identifying source credibility and implementing effective response strategies