• Asia pacific journal of information systems
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• v.32 no.3
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• pp.514-536
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• 2022

Online reviews offer valuable information to businesses by reflecting consumer experiences about their products and services. Two crucial aspects of online reviews are the topics consumers choose to address, and the sentiments expressed in their reviews. Building upon previous literature that shows online reviews are context-dependent, we employ the Expectation-Confirmation Theory (ECT) to examine the impact of topic distribution on review sentiment in South Korea and the U.S. during pre- and post-pandemic periods. After applying a topic modeling to Airbnb app review data, we measure the contribution of each topic on review sentiment using SHAP values. Our results indicate variations in topic distribution trends between 2018 and 2021. In addition, the order and magnitude of topics' impact on review sentiment change between pre- and post-pandemic periods for both countries. This study can help businesses understand how topics and sentiments associated with their products and services changed after the pandemic and thus identify areas of improvement.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.29 no.4
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• pp.31-49
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• 2023

With the growth of the food-catering industry, consumer preferences and the number of dine-in restaurants are gradually increasing. Thus, personalized recommendation services are required to select a restaurant suitable for consumer preferences. Previous studies have used questionnaires and star-rating approaches, which do not effectively depict consumer preferences. Online reviews are the most essential sources of information in this regard. However, previous studies have aggregated online reviews into long documents, and traditional machine-learning methods have been applied to these to extract semantic representations; however, such approaches fail to consider the surrounding word or context. Therefore, this study proposes a novel review textual-based restaurant recommendation model (RT-RRM) that uses deep learning to effectively extract consumer preferences from online reviews. The proposed model concatenates consumer-restaurant interactions with the extracted high-level semantic representations and predicts consumer preferences accurately and effectively. Experiments on real-world datasets show that the proposed model exhibits excellent recommendation performance compared with several baseline models.

• 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.4
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• pp.29-50
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• 2023

Purpose The impact of online reviews is widely acknowledged, with extensive research focused on text-based reviews. However, there's a lack of research regarding reviews in video format. To address this gap, this study aims to explore the connection between company-sponsored product review videos and the extent of directive speech within them. This article analyzed viewer sentiments expressed in video comments based on the level of directive speech used by the presenter. Design/methodology/approach This study involved analyzing speech acts in review videos based on sponsorship and examining consumer reactions through sentiment analysis of comments. We used Speech Act theory to perform the analysis. Findings YouTubers who receive company sponsorship for review videos tend to employ more directive speech. Furthermore, this increased use of directive speech is associated with a higher occurrence of negative consumer comments. This study's outcomes are valuable for the realm of user-generated content and natural language processing, offering practical insights for YouTube marketing strategies.

• Journal of Distribution Science
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• v.11 no.4
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• pp.13-21
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• 2013

Purpose - The purpose of this research is to find out the relationship between cue utilization and perceived website quality and purchase intention for an online store. To achieve this, we suggest a conceptual model that examines the relationship among product introductions, online communications, online reviews, perceived quality, and online purchase intention. Research design, data, and methodology - This research utilizes SPSS 19.0 and AMOS17.0 to analyze the data. We used factor analysis to shape the structure of the original data and saved the information with multiple dimensions. We then deployed the AMOS software to analyze the model. We performed both factor analysis and structural equation analysis. Results - The findings of this study show that graphic and word descriptions, online chatting, and online reviews have a positive influence on perceived quality. Furthermore, perceived quality has a positive influence on purchase intention. Conclusions - First, detailed product information should be added to influence quality perception. Second, consumers expect a certain level of service while shopping. Simultaneously, online products reviews from consumers deserve attention as they can impact consumer purchase intention.

• Information Systems Review
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• v.23 no.1
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• pp.45-68
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• 2021

As the influence of online reviews on consumer decision-making increases, concerns about review manipulation are also increasing. Fake reviews or review manipulations are emerging as an important problem by posting untrue reviews in order to increase sales volume, causing the consumer's reverse choice, and acting at a high cost to the society as a whole. Most of the related prior studies have focused on predicting review manipulation through data mining methods, and research from a consumer perspective is insufficient. However, since the possibility of manipulation of reviews perceived by consumers can affect the usefulness of reviews, it can provide important implications for online word-of-mouth management regardless of whether it is false or not. Therefore, in this study, we analyzed whether there is a difference between the review evaluated by the consumer as being manipulated and the general review, and verified whether the manipulated review negatively affects the review usefulness. For empirical analysis, 34,711 online book reviews on the LibraryThing website were analyzed using multilevel logistic regression analysis and Poisson regression analysis. As a result of the analysis, it was found that there were differences in product level, reviewer level, and review level factors between reviews that consumers perceived as being manipulated and reviews that were not. In addition, manipulated reviews have been shown to negatively affect review usefulness.

• Information Systems Review
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• v.26 no.2
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• pp.23-43
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• 2024

Nowadays, online reviews have become a common word of mouth that many users produce and consume. Posting online reviews is a kind of job that consumers do themselves. Since posting online reviews is not mandatory, it entirely relies on the consumer's voluntary willingness. In this respect, this study aims to describe the motivation for posting online reviews and their behavior processes, such as why online reviewers generate reviews and what types of reviews they create. In this study, we have conducted an in-depth study with 18 participants who have experience in posting reviews. By analyzing interview manuscripts from the grounded theory method approach, we have ultimately presented motivating factors for review posting (mutual reciprocity, material rewards), determinants of review browsing (trust toward review contents, preference for review format), and shadow work (a job that must be done, voluntary data production, consumer's share). We have also proposed the dynamics between core dimensions for theorizing a cycle process of review production and consumption. Our findings could bridge the gap in the existing online review research and offer practical implications for platform companies that need review management.

• Asia Marketing Journal
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• v.13 no.3
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• pp.209-231
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• 2011

Internet is having strong impact on the consumer's decision making process. Information search has been done actively through internet today. The online reviews can be crucial information cue to evaluate the alternarive products. The online WOM(Word-Of-Mouth) effect depends on the characteristics of information sender, receiver, and WOM. This study is to examine the influence of the online word of mouth on the consumer purchase intention and the moderating role of product involvement, consumer regulatory focus and self-efficacy. Positive customer reviews on the products influence the purchase intention positively and negative customer reviews influence it negatively. Moderating role of involvement in the causal relation between the valence of online reviews and purchase intention is tested. In case of positive WOM, it is predicted that purchase intention for high involvement products is higher than that of low involvement. In case of negative WOM, purchase intention for high involvement product is lower than that of low involvement product. And this study invetigate the moderating role of regulatory focus. In case of positive WOM, it is predicted that promotion focus oriented consumers have higher purchase intention than prevention focus oriented consumers. In case of negative WOM, prediction is that prevention focus oriented consumers have lower purchase intention than promotion focus oriented consumers. Then we examine the moderating role of self efficacy in the causal relation between the valence of online reviews and purchase intention. In case of positive WOM, it is predicted that consumers with low self efficacy have higher purchase intention than consumers with high self efficacy. In case of negative WOM, it is predicted that consumers with low self efficacy have lower purchase intention than consumers with high self efficacy. Emprical results support our prediction and four hypotheses derived from our conceptual framework are all accepted. This study suggest that the level of product involvement, consumer regulatory focus and the level of self-efficacy influence the consumer responses of the valence of online reviews. Therefore marketers need to manage online reviews based on the level of product involvement, regulatory focus orientation and the level of self-efficacy of target consumers.

• Asia Marketing Journal
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• v.26 no.1
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• pp.23-30
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• 2024

Firms often engage in manipulating online reviews as a promotional activity to influence consumers' evaluation on their products. With the prevalence of the promotional activities, consumers may notice and discount the reviews generated by the promotional activities. Discounting the firm-generating reviews may cause systematic measurement errors in the valence variable and lead to a negative bias when estimating the effect of consumers' organic reviews on demand. To correct the bias, this study proposes including product-specific bias-correction terms representing the proportion of extreme reviews in analysis. For illustration, the proposed method is applied to a demand model for data of movies released in South Korea. The results confirm a negative bias in the estimate of the valence sensitivity of demand. The negative bias potentially leads to an underestimation of the magnitude of the contagion effect through social interactions, a key component of evaluating the value of a satisfied consumer.

• Asia pacific journal of information systems
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• v.33 no.2
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• pp.261-281
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• 2023

The proliferation of online customer reviews has completely changed how consumers purchase. Consumers now heavily depend on authentic experiences shared by previous customers. However, deceptive reviews that aim to manipulate customer decision-making to promote or defame a product or service pose a risk to businesses and buyers. The studies investigating consumer perception of deceptive reviews found that one of the important cues is based on review content. This study aims to investigate the impact of the information amount of review on the review truthfulness. This study adopted the Information Manipulation Theory (IMT) as an overarching theory, which asserts that the violations of one or more of the Gricean maxim are deceptive behaviors. It is regarded as a quantity violation if the required information amount is not delivered or more information is delivered; that is an attempt at deception. A topic modeling algorithm is implemented to reveal the distribution of each topic embedded in a text. This study measures information amount as topic diversity based on the results of topic modeling, and topic diversity shows how heterogeneous a text review is. Two datasets of restaurant reviews on Yelp.com, which have Filtered (deceptive) and Unfiltered (genuine) reviews, were used to test the hypotheses. Reviews that contain more diverse topics tend to be truthful. However, excessive topic diversity produces an inverted U-shaped relationship with truthfulness. Moreover, we find an interaction effect between topic diversity and reviews' ratings. This result suggests that the impact of topic diversity is strengthened when deceptive reviews have lower ratings. This study contributes to the existing literature on IMT by building the connection between topic diversity in a review and its truthfulness. In addition, the empirical results show that topic diversity is a reliable measure for gauging information amount of reviews.