How do people shop online? What is the best way to report the information?

Word of Mouth Reviews in Hospitality and Tourism Management (see source)
-Discusses how hospitality services, like finding a doctor, is a distinct type of decision to finding and evaluating products.

• study asserts that for services that are intangible like hospitality, "interpersonal influence" is more important. This is the idea that consumers have a greater ability to influence eachother in decision-making.
• These types of decisions are high-risk

Information overload in e-commerce decision-making (see source)

• filters can help to alleviate perceived information overload
• individuals vary in their ability to process different levels of information
• more experienced online shoppers are able to process information more effectively and more efficiently

What makes a helpful online review (see source)

• for experience goods (those that require being experienced in order to be reviewed, like a doctor), extreme ratings (1 out of 5 stars, or 5 out of 5 stars) are less helpful than moderate ratings (3 out of 5 stars).
• taste plays a big role in ratings of experienced goods, therefore the majority of the ratings are extreme. However, consumers are often skeptical of the tastes of others, so these ratings aren't as helpful
• They find that lengthier, more detailed reviews are less helpful for experience goods versus "search goods" (things that don't need to be experienced to give a rating to, like cameras)

How to effectively present healthcare performance data to consumers (see source)

• the top 3 factors identified by consumers as most important are for quality of care:
• affordability of care
• doctor qualifications
• access to care for everyone
• too much information is counterproductive (even though consumers often report wanting more information)
• weighting or prioritizing different factors (of care) is difficult for consumers. Is this also true of physician factors??
• Currently, consumers must process large amounts of information, identify relevant factors and prioritize them, and bring all of this together into a choice. This is a difficult task for humans to do effectively. As a result, consumers aren't quick to use these tools, leading to low review/feedback rates (negative feedback loop). --> the problem
• proposed solution: make information more relevant to what consumers already understand and care about.
• avoid technical jargon, frame information clearly --> "physician is trusting and friendly"
• allowing users to drill down if they want can ease the burden of too much information up front. Make the specifics available but not in your face.
• make sure ratings metrics are consistent 
• summarizing and interpreting information for the consumer can be really helpful. This could mean visually organizing and ordering a list of physicians in a certain way
• use colors and symbols rather than numbers when possible
• The problem with cost information: Americans are biased to believe that higher cost indicates higher quality, which is not always the case. Because of this, cost information should be shown within quality strata.

Supporting consumer healthcare decisions through data presentation (see source)

• consumers tend to take shortcuts when there is an informational overload in the decision process. 
• overweight the factors they understand
• overweight one factor over other important factors to reduce the number of choices
• most current tools that help consumers compare options are based on the assumption that consumers know what is most important to them and can therefore weight the presented information effectively to make their choices. This has been shown to be an inaccurate assumption.
• when people are in a situation that is both complex and unfamiliar, they likely do not have fixed ideas about what is important to them. In this case, information presentation has a significant impact on what is attended to and used.
• even when information is understandable to a consumer at an analytic level (knowing what the numbers mean), it may not be understandable at an emotional level (how good is a 4/5 rating?).
• use symbols/colors instead of or in addition to numbers alone