Subjective Judgment, Cognitive Style and Ecommerce Website Evaluation: A Non-Parametric Approach

This paper presents a non-parametric approach useful to investigates to what extent the cognitive styles of ecommerce website users affect their perception of a website quality. The cognitive efficiency concept is adopted to model the perceived quality of a website during website-user interaction, while the PLSI model based on the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) is implemented to classify the website user cognitive style. Finally, the Malmquist index is calculated to measure the effect of the user cognitive style on the outcome of the website quality evaluation. An empirical investigation was performed with the evaluation of 10 ecommerce websites. Results show that the website evaluation is influenced by the users cognitive styles.