Information richness on service business websites

Delivering rich information is the key success factor for service business websites. Numerous studies have investigated useful guidelines to deliver rich information. The implicit assumption made by these studies is individual homogeneity. This study argues that this is only one side of the story, as individual heterogeneity is also important. Specifically, this study questions relationships between personal dispositional factors and the person’s perception of information richness. Dispositional factors of interest are age and personality. This study adopted information processing theory as its theoretical lens. A review of literature through the lens leads to the development of six hypotheses. The insurance industry provided the context of this study. Data were collected from 110 potential customers of 10 insurance organizations. The Hierarchical Linear Modeling technique was utilized for model building and hypotheses testing. The result revealed that aging individuals often find information as low in richness. Furthermore, those with high consciousness and extraversion generally perceived information as higher in richness. Lastly, the other three dimensions of personality showed no association with information richness.