Wang, Fang and Karimi, Sahar 
ORCID: 0000-0002-0551-1040
(2020)
Sense and Sensibility: What are Customers Looking for in Online Product Reviews? An Abstract.
In: Academy of Marketing Science Annual Conference, 2019-5-29 - 2019-5-31, Vancouver, Canada.
|
PDF
Submitted deposit.pdf - Author Accepted Manuscript Download (637kB) | Preview |
Abstract
Online product reviews have become the single, largest depository of supplementary information that customers use in their product search, evaluation, and purchase process. The innate value of online reviews lays in the valuable information they provide to prospective customers in their decision making. This has inspired researchers to identify the characteristics of helpful reviews. Extent research suggests that helpful reviews are often of certain numeric features, such as lengthy details and unequivocal rating (Karimi and Wang 2017; Mudambi and Schuff 2010). However, these numeric features do not reveal the nature of the review content. Recognizing the importance of review content, recent studies gear toward examining review content, with a focus on sentiment, using text analysis techniques (Cao et al. 2011; Salehan and Kim 2016). Apart from sentiment, the impact of other content characteristics of online reviews is largely unknown. This research explores online review content by decomposing and comparing three fundamental information components that a review may contain: sensory information (i.e., reviewer’s observation), cognitive information (i.e., thoughts/analysis), and affective information (i.e., emotions). These components are directly associated with three fundamental psychological processes (observation, thinking, and emotion) that people experience to interact with and make sense of the world. When writing a review, reviewers tangle various types of information together to construct narratives and express opinions, creating a complex review content. Readers, on the other side, retrieve and evaluate the information of all types to form an opinion on the quality and helpfulness of the review. Distinguishing these different information components and analyzing their direct and combined effects can significantly enhance our knowledge of consumer’s information needs and online search behavior. This research performs text analysis to capture the three types of information in online product reviews, analyze their patterns and effects on perceived information value. Results from analyzing a sample of 56,752 reviews from Amazon.com indicate that sensory information in online review content has a significantly positive effect on online review helpfulness; whereas, this effect is insignificant for cognitive information, and significantly negative for affective information. This indicates that review readers highly value reviewer’s observations and their expression of sensory experience, are indifferent toward reviewer’s thoughts and analysis, and dislike expression of emotions in review content. This pattern is more salient in reviews of search goods than those of experience goods.
| Item Type: | Conference or Workshop Item (Unspecified) |
|---|---|
| Uncontrolled Keywords: | Mental Health, Behavioral and Social Science, Basic Behavioral and Social Science, Mental health |
| Depositing User: | Symplectic Admin |
| Date Deposited: | 28 Nov 2022 09:27 |
| Last Modified: | 15 Mar 2024 13:39 |
| DOI: | 10.1007/978-3-030-39165-2_254 |
| Related URLs: | |
| URI: | https://livrepository.liverpool.ac.uk/id/eprint/3166419 |
Dimensions
Dimensions
