The helpfulness of online reviews

Consumers with specialised and diverse experience produce more helpful reviews

Purpose

Experienced reviewers in general can produce high-quality product reviews, and thereby get more helpful votes. This paper explores the question that whether the depth and width of the reviewers' experience distribution have effects on the helpfulness of their reviews.

Design/methodology/approach

Adopting the restaurant review data from Yelp, the present paper classifies the restaurants in to different categories applying the Word2Vec technique, such as Asian or fast food. By evaluating the number of a user's historical reviews in a specific category, and the evenness of such distribution in different categories, the experience specialty and experience diversity are defined respectively.

Findings

The analysis shows that users specialised in a given category can produce more helpful reviews in that category. The users with diverse historical experience, i.e. have posted reviews for many categories, also can produce helpful reviews. In addition, the experience diversity shows a positive moderation effect on the influence of experience specialty. Thus, users with diverse experience while specialized in a particular category are the source of most helpful reviews.

Originality/value

While previous studies mostly consider the raw number of historical reviews as a reviewer's experience, we distinguish such experience by product category and focus on the width and depth of its distribution. The results not only shed lights on the mining of high-quality reviews and reviewers but also provide insights on the management of online review platforms and electronic marketing.

The effect of reviewer's review volumes on online consumer reviews' perceived usefulness: An event-related potential study

What is the most useful online consumer review? Consumers face the challenge of identifying useful online consumer reviews, some of which might have been manipulated by retailers. Reviewer's review volumes is the past behavior of a reviewer which is one of the most important cues of the reviewer expertise. While reviewer cues are receiving increasing attention, the effect of reviewer's review volumes on the perceived usefulness of online consumer review remains under-explored. This research explored the underlying neural mechanism of reviewer's review volumes on the perceived usefulness of online consumer reviews by applying the event-related potentials (ERPs) approach. Behaviorally, a higher perceived usefulness rate and reduced reaction time were observed for the high-review-volume condition compared to the low-review-volume condition, indicating that the high-review-volume condition was more desirable to the participants. At the neural level, the high-review-volume condition elicited an attenuated N2 and an increased LPP compared with the low-review volume condition, suggesting a more positive evaluation of the high-review volume condition. These results showed the positive impact of the reviewer's review volumes on the perceived usefulness of online consumer reviews and its potential neural substrates.

A good dentist or not: understanding the role of storytelling in online dentist reviews

Purpose

Narrative comments about dentists on physician review sites have been documented to increasingly influence people's selection of their dentists. From a communication standpoint, these comments are a type of narrative communication that people share their experiences with dentists by telling stories. Based on the frameworks of rhetoric structure theory and extended elaborated likelihood model, this study aimed to examine the effects of such storytelling from two perspectives including narrative structure and narrative focus.

Design/methodology/approach

A 4 (narrative structure) × 2 (narrative focus) between-subjects experiment was conducted to examine the proposed hypotheses and research questions

Findings

The results showed that a one-sided comprehensive comment focusing on technical competence generated the strongest persuasion effects measured by attitude and behavioral intention. These effects were mediated by perceived narrative credibility and enjoyment.

Originality/value

This study contributes to the extant literature in two ways. First, it extends previous studies of online narrative comments by showing which narrative structure and focus are deemed to be more persuasive when selecting a dentist. Second, it offers a test of two routes of information processing (i.e. cognitive and experiential) to understand the mechanism underlying the effects of narrative comments.

Peer review

The peer-review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/OIR-08-2020-0359