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http://dx.doi.org/10.15813/kmr.2022.23.2.013

The Impact of Online Review Content and Linguistic Style on Review Helpfulness  

Li, Jiaen (College of Business, KwangWoon University)
Yan, Jinzhe (School of Business, Gachon University)
Publication Information
Knowledge Management Research / v.23, no.2, 2022 , pp. 253-276 More about this Journal
Abstract
Online reviews attract much attention because they play an essential role in consumer decision-making. Therefore, it is necessary to investigate the review attributes that affect the perceived helpfulness of consumers. However, most previous studies on the helpfulness of online reviews mainly focus on quantitative factors such as review volume and reviewer attributes. Recently, some studies have investigated the impact of review content and linguistic style matching on consumers' purchase decision-making. Those studies show that consumers consider additional review attributes when evaluating reviews in decision-making. To fill the research gap with existing literature, we investigated the impact of review content and linguistic style matching on review helpfulness. Moreover, this study investigated how the reviewers' expertise moderates the effect of the review content and linguistic style matching on the review helpfulness. The empirical results show that positive affective content has a negative effect on the review helpfulness. The negative affective content and linguistic style matching positively affect review helpfulness. Review expertise relieved the impact of negative affective content and linguistic style matching on review helpfulness. According to the mechanism confirmed in this study, online e-commerce companies can achieve corporate sales growth by identifying factors affecting review helpfulness and reflecting them in their marketing strategies.
Keywords
Online Review Content; Linguistic Style; Reviewer Expertise; Review Helpfulness;
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