• The Journal of Information Systems
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• v.29 no.2
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• pp.173-195
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• 2020

Purpose The purpose of this study is to verify the effect of reviewer's attributes on review usefulness while exploring the variables that can moderate the relationship between reviewer's attributes and review usefulness through empirical analysis. Design/methodology/approach To understand the impact of online reviewer profiles on review usefulness and how these impacts change, this study collected more than 30,000 online reviews of restaurants through TripAdvisor.com, that is a representative OTA shares tourism information. We analyze the moderating effects of four variables such as review length, review equivocality, review uncertainty, and review readability. Findings According to the empirical analysis result, this study reveals that the reviewer's profile attribute can significantly improve the review usefulness of the reviewer, and confirmed the moderating effect of the review's attribute(Review length, Equivocality, Uncertainty, Readability).

• The Journal of Industrial Distribution & Business
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• v.14 no.1
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• pp.67-74
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• 2023

Purpose: This study aims to investigate how the online review usefulness affect consumers' shopping behavior in non-face-to-face shopping, which is now very common format of shopping environment after COVID-19 pandemic. Factors influencing online reviews were determined as quantity of review, agreement of review and characteristic of review based on research by existing researchers. Research design, data, and methodology: Customers in their teens to 60s who had experience of checking online reviews and purchasing products were surveyed using a Google questionnaire form from January 15, 2022 to February 19, 2022. To verify the validity and reliability of the research model, confirmatory factor analysis and discriminant validity analysis were conducted. In addition, the causal relationship between factors was verified through path analysis. Results: As a result, quantity of review and agreement of review had a statistically significant effect on review usefulness. However, characteristic of review did not have a statistically significant influence on review usefulness. And review usefulness had a statistically significant effect on attitude and purchase intention. Conclusions: This study investigated the factors affecting usefulness of online reviews and empirically analyzed the effects of online reviews on consumer attitudes and purchase intentions providing practical and theoretical implications for corporate online review management.

• Asia pacific journal of information systems
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• v.29 no.2
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• pp.181-202
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• 2019

The purpose of this study is to explore the effect of different types of simultaneous presentation (i.e., reviewer information, textual and visual content, and similarity between textual-visual contents) on review usefulness and review enjoyment in online restaurant reviews (ORRs), as they are interrelated yet have rarely been examined together in previous research. By using Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) topic modeling and state-of-the-art machine learning (ML) methodologies, we found that review readability in textual content and salient objects in images in visual content have a significant impact on both review usefulness and review enjoyment. Moreover, similarity between textual-visual contents was found to be a major factor in determining review usefulness but not review enjoyment. As for reviewer information, reputation, expertise, and location of residence, these were found to be significantly related to review enjoyment. This study contributes to the body of knowledge on ORRs and provides valuable implications for general users and managers in the hospitality and tourism industries.

• The Journal of Information Systems
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• v.31 no.2
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• pp.159-177
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• 2022

Purpose Online reviews are critical for sales of online shopping platforms because they provide useful information to consumers. As the eCommerce market grows rapidly, the role of online reviews is becoming more important. The purpose of this study is to analyze how online reviews written by domestic consumers affect product sales by classifying the types of products. Design/methodology/approach This study analyzed how the effects of review characteristics(reviewer reputation, reviewer exposure, review length, time, rating, image, and emotional score) on the usefulness of online reviews differ depending on the product types. Subsequently, how the impact of review attributes (review usefulness, number of reviews, ratings, and emotional scores) on product sales differs according to each product type was compared. Based on the FCB Grid model, the product type was classified into high involvement-rational, high involvement-emotional, low involvement -rational, and low involvement-emotional product types. Findings According to the analysis result, the characteristics of reviews useful to consumers were different for each product type, and the review attributes affecting product sales were also different for each product type. This study confirmed that it revealed that product characteristics are major consideration in evaluating the review usefulness and the factors affecting product sales.

• Journal of Information Technology Applications and Management
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• v.25 no.2
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• pp.53-72
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• 2018

This empirical study explored characteristics that affect the usefulness of online reviews, in the China e-commerce platform, and implemented multiple regressions to find factors that significantly influence on product sales, ultimately. Till now, prior studies have continuously revealed what factor affects usefulness of online review or product sales, only in respective terms. The point of our study is that we built two-level regression models, thereby being able to comprehensively analyze these two different targets. Before plunging into running regressions, we carefully collected 192,764 online review data for 200 products extracted from the Jingdong, the second biggest e-commerce platform in China. Also, we gathered "review sentimental scores" variable from each review and used that one as a core variable in our regression model, thus we were able to implement both quantitative and qualitative research. The evidences from the two-level regression models showed that the extent to which a product is experience good positively affects both usefulness of a review and product sales, again the usefulness of a review contributes to product sales in sequence. Also, the property of experience good has interaction effect on both for two-level regression models. Our main findings highlight the importance of role of online review to business performance of e-commerce firms.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Clothing and Textiles
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• v.40 no.6
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• pp.994-1009
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• 2016

Applying the S-O-R Model within an online context, a hypothesized model incorporates three review characteristics (perceived concreteness, exaggeration, and sufficient quantity of reviews) for apparel products in order to present their impact on consumer perceptions of review usefulness and consumer attitude toward and patronage intent for the online stores hosting the reviews. An online survey of Korean women (N=299) reported their experiences in purchasing apparel products online and reading apparel reviews on a regular basis. Testing of the hypothesized model showed the usefulness of reviews were determined by two review characteristics (S: perceived concreteness and sufficient quantity of reviews); however, the negative effect of exaggerated reviews were insignificant. In addition, the perceived usefulness of reviews (O-cognitive) hosted by an online store influenced online store attitude (O-affective) which subsequently led to online store patronage intent (R). This study systemically advances online retail literature by showing how the characteristics of online reviews (as a part of the online store environment) can influence attitude toward online stores and patronage intent for online stores. Long term relationships with consumers can be achieved through the building of mechanisms to enhance the perceived usefulness of reviews by employing the strategies of hosting concrete reviews and offering a sufficient quantity of reviews. This study addresses removes research gaps by testing an adapted the S-O-R Model that frames review information as an element of an online store environment using a large sample.

• Knowledge Management Research
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• v.19 no.4
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• pp.1-17
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• 2018

Hotel consumers tend to rely on online reviews to reduce the risk to hotel products when they book hotel rooms because hotel products are high-risk products due to their intangibility. However, the development of ICT has caused information load, and it is an important issue to be perceived as useful information to consumer because a large amount of information complicates the decision making process of consumers. Drawn from Heuristic-Systematic Model(HSM), the present study explored the role of heuristic and systematic cues composing an online review influencing consumers' perception of hotel online reviews. More specifically, this study identified reviewers' identity, level of the reviewer, review star ratings, and attached hotel photo as heuristic cue, while review length, cognitive level of review and negativity in review as systematic cues. The binary logistic regression was adopted for analysis. This study found that only systematic cues of online review were found to affect the usefulness of it. Moreover, we preceded further study examining the moderating effect of seasonality in the relationships between systematic cues and usefulness.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.22 no.1
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• pp.43-61
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• 2016

Customer reviews help potential customers make purchasing decisions. However, the prevalence of reviews on websites push the customer to sift through them and change the focus from a mere search to identifying which of the available reviews are valuable and useful for the purchasing decision at hand. To identify useful reviews, websites have developed different mechanisms to give customers options when evaluating existing reviews. Websites allow users to rate the usefulness of a customer review as helpful or not. Amazon.com uses a ratio-type helpfulness, while Yelp.com uses a count-type usefulness index. This usefulness index provides helpful reviews to future potential purchasers. This study investigated the effects of sentiment and readability on useful votes for customer reviews. Similar studies on the relationship between sentiment and readability have focused on the ratio-type usefulness index utilized by websites such as Amazon.com. In this study, Yelp.com's count-type usefulness index for restaurant reviews was used to investigate the relationship between sentiment/readability and usefulness votes. Yelp.com's online customer reviews for stores in the beverage and food categories were used for the analysis. In total, 170,294 reviews containing information on a store's reputation and popularity were used. The control variables were the review length, store reputation, and popularity; the independent variables were the sentiment and readability, while the dependent variable was the number of helpful votes. The review rating is the moderating variable for the review sentiment and readability. The length is the number of characters in a review. The popularity is the number of reviews for a store, and the reputation is the general average rating of all reviews for a store. The readability of a review was calculated with the Coleman-Liau index. The sentiment is a positivity score for the review as calculated by SentiWordNet. The review rating is a preference score selected from 1 to 5 (stars) by the review author. The dependent variable (i.e., usefulness votes) used in this study is a count variable. Therefore, the Poisson regression model, which is commonly used to account for the discrete and nonnegative nature of count data, was applied in the analyses. The increase in helpful votes was assumed to follow a Poisson distribution. Because the Poisson model assumes an equal mean and variance and the data were over-dispersed, a negative binomial distribution model that allows for over-dispersion of the count variable was used for the estimation. Zero-inflated negative binomial regression was used to model count variables with excessive zeros and over-dispersed count outcome variables. With this model, the excess zeros were assumed to be generated through a separate process from the count values and therefore should be modeled as independently as possible. The results showed that positive sentiment had a negative effect on gaining useful votes for positive reviews but no significant effect on negative reviews. Poor readability had a negative effect on gaining useful votes and was not moderated by the review star ratings. These findings yield considerable managerial implications. The results are helpful for online websites when analyzing their review guidelines and identifying useful reviews for their business. Based on this study, positive reviews are not necessarily helpful; therefore, restaurants should consider which type of positive review is helpful for their business. Second, this study is beneficial for businesses and website designers in creating review mechanisms to know which type of reviews to highlight on their websites and which type of reviews can be beneficial to the business. Moreover, this study highlights the review systems employed by websites to allow their customers to post rating reviews.

• Journal of Information Technology Applications and Management
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• v.16 no.4
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• pp.41-58
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• 2009

This research investigated how people are influenced to adopt online review. We applied the Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM) and the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) to this study. Our research model highlights the assessment of online review usefulness as a mediator from online review quality to online review adoption. This research predicted online review consensus has a role to bulid up online reviw usefulness. This study also includes vividness and perceived similarity as determinants of online review quality. Survey data reflect user's perceptions of actual online review they read. Results support most of research hypotheses except hypothesis related to moderating effect of user involvement. This research offers a model for understanding online review user's acceptance. Additional theoretical and practical implications are also discussed in the paper.

• The Journal of Society for e-Business Studies
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• v.27 no.2
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• pp.153-173
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• 2022

This study analyzes yelp's online restaurant reviews written in 2019 and explores the factors influencing the decision of the usefulness for online reviews in the restaurant consumption decision process. Specifically, factors expected to affect review usefulness are classified according to the Elaboration Likelihood model. Also, it is assumed that the price range of the restaurant would have a moderating role. For the analysis, datasets provided by yelp.com in February 2020 are used. Among the datasets, online reviews of businesses located in Nevada in the US and belonging to the Food and Restaurant categories are targeted. As a result of the negative binomial regression analysis, it is confirmed that the central cues including review depth and readability and the peripheral cues including review consistency, reviewer popularity, and reviewer exposure positively affect the review usefulness. It is also confirmed that the influences of antecedents that affect the review restaurant prices moderate the effect of the central and peripheral cues on the review usefulness. It also provides implications for the need for price-differentiated review management strategies by review platforms and restaurant businesses.