Reading Consumer Reviews to Confirm My Expectations: The Accelerated Impact of Confirmation under Extreme Review Tones

This study examines how the initially perceived product value affects a consumer’s purchase intention after he/she reads various tones of online reviews. It proposes that the associations among the initially perceived product value, the level of confirmation made by reading reviews and final purchase intention would differ across review tones that; 1) when the tone is extreme, the impact of confirmation will be stronger than when the tone is moderate and 2) when the tone is favorable, the impact of initially perceived product value will be stronger than when the tone is critical. The survey was conducted to 276 online shopping mall users in Korea and most of hypotheses were supported. This study emphasizes that the impact of online review should be discussed together with the level of expectation that a customer had before reading online reviews, because the customers have to go through searching and screening processes before reading online reviews.