The Social Aspect of Voting for Useful Reviews

Word-of-mouth is being replaced by online reviews on products and services. To identify the most useful reviews, many web sites enable readers to vote on which reviews they find useful. In this work we use three hypotheses to predict which reviews will be voted useful. The first is that useful reviews induce feelings. The second is that useful reviews are both informative and expressive, thus contain less adjectives while being longer. The third hypothesis is that the reviewer’s history can be used as a predictor. We devise impact metrics similar to the scientific metrics for assessing the impact of a scholar, namely h-index, i5-index. We analyze the performance of our hypotheses over three datasets collected from Yelp and Amazon. Our surprising and robust results show that the only good predictor to the usefulness of a review is the reviewer’s impact metrics score. We further devise a regression model that predicts the usefulness rating of each review. To further understand these results we characterize reviewers with high impact metrics scores and show that they write reviews frequently, and that their impact scores increase with time, on average. We suggest the term local celebs for these reviewers, and analyze the conditions for becoming local celebs on sites.