• Asia Marketing Journal
• /
• v.15 no.4
• /
• pp.61-101
• /
• 2014

This study investigates when and how disagreements in online customer ratings prompt more favorable product evaluations. Among the three metrics of volume, valence, and variance that feature in the research on online customer ratings, volume and valence have exhibited consistently positive patterns in their effects on product sales or evaluations (e.g., Dellarocas, Zhang, and Awad 2007; Liu 2006). Ratings variance, or the degree of disagreement among reviewers, however, has shown rather mixed results, with some studies reporting positive effects on product sales (e.g., Clement, Proppe, and Rott 2007) while others finding negative effects on product evaluations (e.g., Zhu and Zhang 2010). This study aims to resolve these contradictory findings by introducing preference heterogeneity as a possible moderator and causal attribution as a mediator to account for the moderating effect. The main proposition of this study is that when preference heterogeneity is perceived as high, a disagreement in ratings is attributed more to reviewers' different preferences than to unreliable product quality, which in turn prompts better quality evaluations of a product. Because disagreements mostly result from differences in reviewers' tastes or the low reliability of a product's quality (Mizerski 1982; Sen and Lerman 2007), a greater level of attribution to reviewer tastes can mitigate the negative effect of disagreement on product evaluations. Specifically, if consumers infer that reviewers' heterogeneous preferences result in subjectively different experiences and thereby highly diverse ratings, they would not disregard the overall quality of a product. However, if consumers infer that reviewers' preferences are quite homogeneous and thus the low reliability of the product quality contributes to such disagreements, they would discount the overall product quality. Therefore, consumers would respond more favorably to disagreements in ratings when preference heterogeneity is perceived as high rather than low. This study furthermore extends this prediction to the various levels of average ratings. The heuristicsystematic processing model so far indicates that the engagement in effortful systematic processing occurs only when sufficient motivation is present (Hann et al. 2007; Maheswaran and Chaiken 1991; Martin and Davies 1998). One of the key factors affecting this motivation is the aspiration level of the decision maker. Only under conditions that meet or exceed his aspiration level does he tend to engage in systematic processing (Patzelt and Shepherd 2008; Stephanous and Sage 1987). Therefore, systematic causal attribution processing regarding ratings variance is likely more activated when the average rating is high enough to meet the aspiration level than when it is too low to meet it. Considering that the interaction between ratings variance and preference heterogeneity occurs through the mediation of causal attribution, this greater activation of causal attribution in high versus low average ratings would lead to more pronounced interaction between ratings variance and preference heterogeneity in high versus low average ratings. Overall, this study proposes that the interaction between ratings variance and preference heterogeneity is more pronounced when the average rating is high as compared to when it is low. Two laboratory studies lend support to these predictions. Study 1 reveals that participants exposed to a high-preference heterogeneity book title (i.e., a novel) attributed disagreement in ratings more to reviewers' tastes, and thereby more favorably evaluated books with such ratings, compared to those exposed to a low-preference heterogeneity title (i.e., an English listening practice book). Study 2 then extended these findings to the various levels of average ratings and found that this greater preference for disagreement options under high preference heterogeneity is more pronounced when the average rating is high compared to when it is low. This study makes an important theoretical contribution to the online customer ratings literature by showing that preference heterogeneity serves as a key moderator of the effect of ratings variance on product evaluations and that causal attribution acts as a mediator of this moderation effect. A more comprehensive picture of the interplay among ratings variance, preference heterogeneity, and average ratings is also provided by revealing that the interaction between ratings variance and preference heterogeneity varies as a function of the average rating. In addition, this work provides some significant managerial implications for marketers in terms of how they manage word of mouth. Because a lack of consensus creates some uncertainty and anxiety over the given information, consumers experience a psychological burden regarding their choice of a product when ratings show disagreement. The results of this study offer a way to address this problem. By explicitly clarifying that there are many more differences in tastes among reviewers than expected, marketers can allow consumers to speculate that differing tastes of reviewers rather than an uncertain or poor product quality contribute to such conflicts in ratings. Thus, when fierce disagreements are observed in the WOM arena, marketers are advised to communicate to consumers that diverse, rather than uniform, tastes govern reviews and evaluations of products.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
• /
• v.25 no.2
• /
• pp.141-166
• /
• 2019

Recently, channels like social media and SNS create enormous amount of data. In all kinds of data, portions of unstructured data which represented as text data has increased geometrically. But there are some difficulties to check all text data, so it is important to access those data rapidly and grasp key points of text. Due to needs of efficient understanding, many studies about text summarization for handling and using tremendous amounts of text data have been proposed. Especially, a lot of summarization methods using machine learning and artificial intelligence algorithms have been proposed lately to generate summary objectively and effectively which called "automatic summarization". However almost text summarization methods proposed up to date construct summary focused on frequency of contents in original documents. Those summaries have a limitation for contain small-weight subjects that mentioned less in original text. If summaries include contents with only major subject, bias occurs and it causes loss of information so that it is hard to ascertain every subject documents have. To avoid those bias, it is possible to summarize in point of balance between topics document have so all subject in document can be ascertained, but still unbalance of distribution between those subjects remains. To retain balance of subjects in summary, it is necessary to consider proportion of every subject documents originally have and also allocate the portion of subjects equally so that even sentences of minor subjects can be included in summary sufficiently. In this study, we propose "subject-balanced" text summarization method that procure balance between all subjects and minimize omission of low-frequency subjects. For subject-balanced summary, we use two concept of summary evaluation metrics "completeness" and "succinctness". Completeness is the feature that summary should include contents of original documents fully and succinctness means summary has minimum duplication with contents in itself. Proposed method has 3-phases for summarization. First phase is constructing subject term dictionaries. Topic modeling is used for calculating topic-term weight which indicates degrees that each terms are related to each topic. From derived weight, it is possible to figure out highly related terms for every topic and subjects of documents can be found from various topic composed similar meaning terms. And then, few terms are selected which represent subject well. In this method, it is called "seed terms". However, those terms are too small to explain each subject enough, so sufficient similar terms with seed terms are needed for well-constructed subject dictionary. Word2Vec is used for word expansion, finds similar terms with seed terms. Word vectors are created after Word2Vec modeling, and from those vectors, similarity between all terms can be derived by using cosine-similarity. Higher cosine similarity between two terms calculated, higher relationship between two terms defined. So terms that have high similarity values with seed terms for each subjects are selected and filtering those expanded terms subject dictionary is finally constructed. Next phase is allocating subjects to every sentences which original documents have. To grasp contents of all sentences first, frequency analysis is conducted with specific terms that subject dictionaries compose. TF-IDF weight of each subjects are calculated after frequency analysis, and it is possible to figure out how much sentences are explaining about each subjects. However, TF-IDF weight has limitation that the weight can be increased infinitely, so by normalizing TF-IDF weights for every subject sentences have, all values are changed to 0 to 1 values. Then allocating subject for every sentences with maximum TF-IDF weight between all subjects, sentence group are constructed for each subjects finally. Last phase is summary generation parts. Sen2Vec is used to figure out similarity between subject-sentences, and similarity matrix can be formed. By repetitive sentences selecting, it is possible to generate summary that include contents of original documents fully and minimize duplication in summary itself. For evaluation of proposed method, 50,000 reviews of TripAdvisor are used for constructing subject dictionaries and 23,087 reviews are used for generating summary. Also comparison between proposed method summary and frequency-based summary is performed and as a result, it is verified that summary from proposed method can retain balance of all subject more which documents originally have.