How does objective consumer expertise influence the use of recommendations and product attributes as decision support?

Consumers value product recommendations higher than product attributes as a function of their different recommendation sources and different product categories are considered is still unclear. This was addressed in the current study. 163 participants chose among three products in two product categories (mobile phones, hotels) in 20 consecutiver choice tasks (choice-based-conjoint-task). For each product four recommendations and four product attributes were explicitly indicated. Participants’ product expertise was evaluated by a 16-item-questionnaire. The interaction of the influence of recommendations and product attributes with the expertise was significant for mobile phones (F(1,161) = 10.64, p ≤ .001) but not for hotels. Parameter estimates show that a higher product expertise resulted in a decrease of the influence of the recommendations for mobile phones. Thus, individual expertise influences the use of recommendations in buying decisions, but this effect depends on product category.