Limitations and future research

Several limitations of the present work should be noted. First, the conclusions of current study may not be generalized to all product categories or purchase situations. This may due to the fact that some countries have acquired strong images in specific product categories (e.g.

France in wines; Switzerland in watches) (Han and Terpstra, 1988; Kaynak and Cavusgil, 1983; Roth and Romeo, 1992). In another situation, certain COO labels (e.g., developing nations) are associated with high risk perception (Hampton, 1977). When evaluating products of safety concerns (e.g. foods or medicines) made in such countries, individuals are likely to rely more on COO information (Alden, et al, 1993; Bilkey and Nes, 1982) and avoid products from these countries. Under those circumstances, facilitating certain evaluation mode (joint or separate evaluation) might have less influence in countering the negative impact of COO.

Furthermore, in order to have a rigorous experiment design, we controlled many variables (e.g.

brand familiarity, product specifications). This might reduce the external validity of the study.

Therefore the findings should be interpreted with caution. Finally, this study deliberately emphasized brand and COO information. In the real world, the effect discovered by this study may not be as accentuated.

Further research is needed to explore the relationships among brand, COO and evaluation mode. Future studies may wish to examine whether other factors (such as consumer knowledge, consumer ethnocentrism) will influence how evaluation mode interact with the brand and COO effects. Additionally, when other information (such as store name, price) and reference points are available, whether these factors influence the COO effect under different evaluation modes also warrants future research.

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