• 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.

• Asia pacific journal of information systems
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• v.34 no.2
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• pp.372-399
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• 2024

Online reviews play a significant role in consumer purchase decisions on e-commerce platforms. To address information overload in the context of online reviews, factors that drive review helpfulness have received considerable attention from scholars and practitioners. The purpose of this study is to explore the differential effects of discrete emotions (anger, disgust, fear, joy, sadness, and surprise) on perceived review helpfulness, drawing on cognitive appraisal theory of emotion and expectation-confirmation theory. Emotions embedded in 56,157 hotel reviews collected from TripAdvisor.com were extracted based on a transfer learning model to measure emotion variables as an alternative to dictionary-based methods adopted in previous research. We found that anger and fear have positive impacts on review helpfulness, while disgust and joy exert negative impacts. Moreover, hotel star-classification significantly moderates the relationships between several emotions (disgust, fear, and joy) and perceived review helpfulness. Our results extend the understanding of review assessment and have managerial implications for hotel managers and e-commerce vendors.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.29 no.4
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• pp.309-323
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• 2023

As the role of online reviews has become increasingly crucial, numerous studies have been conducted to utilize helpful reviews. Helpful reviews, perceived by customers, have been verified in various research studies to be influenced by factors such as ratings, review length, review content, and so on. The determination of a review's helpfulness is generally based on the number of 'helpful' votes from consumers, with more 'helpful' votes considered to have a more significant impact on consumers' purchasing decisions. However, recently written reviews that have not been exposed to many customers may have relatively few 'helpful' votes and may lack 'helpful' votes altogether due to a lack of participation. Therefore, rather than relying on the number of 'helpful' votes to assess the helpfulness of reviews, we aim to classify them based on review content. In addition, the text of the review emerges as the most influential factor in review helpfulness. This study employs text mining techniques, including topic modeling and sentiment analysis, to analyze the diverse impacts of content and emotions embedded in the review text. In this study, we propose a review helpfulness prediction model based on review content, utilizing movie reviews from IMDb, a global movie information site. We construct a review helpfulness prediction model by using an explainable Graph Neural Network (GNN), while addressing the interpretability limitations of the machine learning model. The explainable graph neural network is expected to provide more reliable information about helpful or non-helpful reviews as it can identify connections between reviews.

• Journal of Information Technology Services
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• v.14 no.4
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• pp.159-169
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• 2015

Customer reviews are one of the important sources for purchase decision makings in online stores. Online stores have tried to provide useful reviews in product pages to customers. To assess the usefulness of customer reviews before other users have voted enough on the reviews, diverse aspects of reviews were utilized in prevous studies. Style and semantic information were utilized in many studies. This study aims to test diverse alogrithms and datasets for identifying a proper classification method and threshold to classify useful reviews. In particular, most researches utilized ratio type helpfulness index as Amazon.com used. However, there is another type of usefulness index utilized in TripAdviser.com or Yelp.com, count type helpfulness index. There was no proper threshold to classify useful reviews yet for count type helpfulness index. This study used reivews and their usefulness votes on restaurnats from Yelp.com to devise diverse datasets and applied text mining approaches to classify useful reviews. Random Forest, SVM, and GLMNET showed the greater values of accuracy than other approaches.