• Journal of Information Technology Services
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• v.13 no.1
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• pp.43-55
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• 2014

More and more people are gravitating to reading products reviews prior to making purchasing decisions. As a number of reviews that vary in usefulness are posted every day, much attention is being paid to measuring their helpfulness. The goal of this paper is to investigate firstly various determinants of the helpfulness of reviews, and intends to examine the moderating effect of product type, i.e., search or experience goods on the product sales, helpfulness and helpfulness votes of online reviews. The determinants include product data, review characteristics, and textual characteristics of reviews. The results indicate that the direct effect exists for the determinants of product sales, helpfulness, and helpfulness votes. Further, the moderating effects of product type exist for these determinants on three dependent variables. The results of study will identify helpful online review and design review sites effectively.

• Journal of Distribution Science
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• v.18 no.10
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• pp.65-75
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• 2020

Purpose: This study aims to examine how to review contents of experiential and utilitarian products (e.g., skincare products) and how to affect review helpfulness by applying natural language processing techniques. Research design, data, and methodology: This study uses 69,633 online reviews generated for the products registered at Amazon.com by 13 Korean cosmetic firms. The authors identify key topics that emerge about consumers' use of skincare products such as skin type and skin trouble, by applying bigram analysis. The review content variables are included in the review helpfulness model, including other important determinants. Results: The estimation results support the positive effect of review extremity and content on the helpfulness. In particular, the reviewer's skin type information was recognized as highly useful when presented together as a basis for high-rated reviews. Moreover, the content related to skin issues positively affects review helpfulness. Conclusions: The positive relationship between extreme reviews and helpfulness of reviews challenges the findings from prior literature. This result implies that an in-depth study of the effect of product types on review helpfulness is needed. Furthermore, a positive effect of review content on helpfulness suggests that applying big data analytics can provide meaningful customer insights in the online retail industry.

• Journal of Distribution Science
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• v.22 no.3
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• pp.113-124
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• 2024

Purpose: This study is a quantitative study and analyzes the effect of evaluating the extreme and usefulness of product reviews on sales performance by using text mining techniques based on product review big data. We investigate whether the perceived helpfulness of product reviews serves as a mediating factor in the impact of product review extremity on sales performance. Research design, data and methodology: The analysis emphasizes customer interaction factors associated with both product review helpfulness and sales performance. Out of the 8.26 million Amazon product reviews in the book category collected by He & McAuley (2016), text mining using natural language processing methodology was performed on 300,000 product reviews, and the hypothesis was verified through hierarchical regression analysis. Results: The extremity of product reviews exhibited a negative impact on the evaluation of helpfulness. And the helpfulness played a mediating role between the extremity of product reviews and sales performance. Conclusion: Increased inclusion of extreme content in the product review's text correlates with a diminished evaluation of helpfulness. The evaluation of helpfulness exerts a negative mediating effect on sales performance. This study offers empirical insights for digital market distributors and sellers, contributing to the research field related to product reviews based on review ratings.

• The Journal of Information Systems
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• v.32 no.3
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• pp.133-150
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• 2023

Purpose This study aims to develop classification models using a decision tree algorithm to identify core keywords and rules influencing online consumer review evaluations for the robot vacuum cleaner on Amazon.com. The difference from previous studies is that we analyze core keywords that affect the evaluation results by dividing the subjects that evaluate online consumer reviews into self-evaluation (star ratings) and peer evaluation (helpfulness votes). We investigate whether the core keywords influencing star ratings and helpfulness votes vary across different products and whether there is a similarity in the core keywords related to star ratings or helpfulness votes across all products. Design/methodology/approach We used random under-sampling to balance the dataset. We progressively removed independent variables based on decreasing importance through backwards elimination to evaluate the classification model's performance. As a result, we identified classification models that best predict star ratings and helpfulness votes for each product's online consumer reviews. Findings We have identified that the core keywords influencing self-evaluation and peer evaluation vary across different products, and even for the same model or features, the core keywords are not consistent. Therefore, companies' producers and marketing managers need to analyze the core keywords of each product to highlight the advantages and prepare customized strategies that compensate for the shortcomings.

• Knowledge Management Research
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• v.23 no.3
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• pp.193-212
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• 2022

Many studies have proposed several factors that affect review helpfulness. Previous studies have investigated the effect of quantitative factors (e.g., star ratings) and affective factors (e.g., sentiment scores) on review helpfulness. Online reviews contain titles and contents, but existing studies focus on the review content. However, there is a limitation to investigating the factors that affect review helpfulness based on the review content without considering the review title. However, previous studies independently investigated the effect of review content and title on review helpfulness. However, it may ignore the potential impact of similarity between review titles and content on review helpfulness. This study used text consistency between review titles and content affect review helpfulness based on the mere exposure effect theory. We also considered the role of information clearness, review length, and source reliability. The results show that text consistency between the review title and the content negatively affects the review helpfulness. Furthermore, we found that information clearness and source reliability weaken the negative effects of text consistency on review helpfulness.

• Knowledge Management Research
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• v.23 no.2
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• pp.253-276
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• 2022

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.

• Knowledge Management Research
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• v.22 no.1
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• pp.243-267
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• 2021

Sentiment represents one's own state through the process of change to stimulus, and emotion represents a simple psychological state felt for a certain phenomenon. These two terms tend to be used interchangeably, but their meaning and usage are different. In this study, we try to find out how it affects the helpfulness of reviews by classifying sentiment and emotion through online reviews written by online consumers after purchasing and using various products and services. Recently, online reviews have become a very important factor for businesses and consumers. Helpful reviews play a key role in the decision-making process of potential customers and can be assessed through review helpfulness. The helpfulness of reviews is becoming increasingly important in practice as it is utilized in marketing strategies in business as well as in purchasing decision-making issues of consumers. And academically, the importance of research to find the factors influencing the helpfulness of reviews is growing. In this study, Yelp.com secured reviews on restaurants and conducted a study on how the sentiment and emotion of online reviews affect the helpfulness of reviews. Based on the prior research, a research model including sentiment and emotions for online reviews was built, and text mining analyzes how the sentiment and emotion of online reviews affect the helpfulness of online reviews, and the difference in the effects on emotions It was verified. The results showed that negative sentiment and emotion had a greater effect on review helpfulness, which was consistent with the negative bias theory.

• The Journal of Information Systems
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• v.27 no.3
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• pp.203-225
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• 2018

Purpose This study investigated the impact of review language style (affective vs. cognitive) on review helpfulness and the moderating effects of the types of attractions in the relationships between the review language and its helpfulness. Design/methodology/approach This study investigates the impact of review language style (affective vs. cognitive) on review helpfulness and the moderating effects of the types of attractions in the relationships between the review language and its helpfulness. This study selected two hedonic and utilitarian attractions (Hedonic: Brandenburg Gate, Utilitarian: Peragamon Museum) located in Berlin. A total of 3,320 reviews was collected from TripAdvisor. We divided online reviews posted for these places into reviews with more affective language and with more cognitive language by using the LIWC. Then, we investigated the impact of language effect on review helpfulness across the attraction type. Findings The findings suggest that peers tend to judge more helpful toward cognitive language in attraction reviews regardless of attraction type. This study found that peers tend to perceive more helpful toward cognitive review in utilitarian attractions. Even though there was an interaction effect between review language and attraction type, in hedonic attractions, the influence of cognitive language was reduced, but still cognitive reviews would get more helpful votes.

• The Journal of Information Systems
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• v.31 no.4
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• pp.161-187
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• 2022

Purpose This study analyzed the topic of game review contents and how the characteristics of game reviews affect the reviews helpfulness. In addition, this study explore the content of game reviews according to the game's sales strategy such as early access strategy and releasing without early access. Design/methodology/approach We collected a list of 3,572 action genre games released in 2020. 58,336 online reviews were collected by random sampling 50 reviews in each games, and topic modeling was performed on those reviews. We dynamized the results of topic modeling and analyzed the effect on review helpfulness with multiple regression analysis. Findings The results of analysis indicate that the longer the review is or the shorter the time it is written, the more helpful the review is. In addition the topic with positive and negative review has a significant effect on the review helpfulness. As a result of exploratory analysis, games from early access had relatively fewer reviews of story-related topics than games that were released without early access. These findings can present direct guidelines for collecting specific opinions from customers in the game industry when releasing games.

• The Journal of Society for e-Business Studies
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• v.16 no.3
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• pp.93-112
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• 2011

For the success of an online retail market, it is important to allow consumers to get more helpful reviews by figuring out the factors determining the helpfulness of online reviews. On the basis of elaboration likelihood model, this study analyzes which factors determine the helpfulness of reviews and how the factors affecting the helpfulness of an online consumer review differ for product price. For this study, 75,226 online consumer reviews were collected from Amazon.com. Furthermore, additional information on review messages was also gathered by carrying out a content analysis on the review messages. This study shows that both of peripheral cues such as review rating and reviewer's credibility and central cues such as word count of review message and the proportion of negative words influence the helpfulness of review. In addition, the result of this study reveals that each consumer focuses on different information sources of reviews depending on the product price.