Does Logical Incoherence Always Hurt Consumer Evaluation? A Study Based on Knowledge Payment

Knowledge payment has long struggled with the general poor evaluation of knowledge products. However, scarce studies have attempted to unveil the antecedents of this issue from the view of the product itself, especially the downsides inherent in its content logic (e.g., logical incoherence). This study explored the effects of two typical types of logical incoherence (i.e., pacing and tortuosity) on consumer evaluation in knowledge payment. Drawing upon consumer value theory and elaboration likelihood model, we proposed a theoretical framework to illustrate the relationships between incoherence and evaluation, and the moderating effects of consumer engagement and experience. Besides, a large language model-based framework, SimCSE, was introduced to measure logical pacing and tortuosity. Our findings reveal that logical pacing is harmful to evaluation while logical tortuosity elicits an opposite effect. Additionally, the effects of logical pacing and tortuosity would be strengthened by consumer engagement and experience, respectively.