This research explores how expressed emotional arousal in a consumer review affects reader perceptions of its helpfulness. Drawing from research on written communication and lay theories of emotion, the authors propose a pattern of diminishing returns, in which the marginal effect of arousal on perceived helpfulness is positive at low levels of arousal but diminishes at higher levels. Results o...

Abstract With increasing volumes of customer reviews, ‘helpfulness’ features have been established by many online platforms as decision-aids for consumers to cope with potential information overload. In this study, we offer a differentiated perspective on the drivers review helpfulness. Using hurdle regression setup both helpfulness and unhelpfulness voting behavior, aim disentangle differentia...

Online customer reviews (OCR) have become an important part of online customers’ decision making. People also use OCR to get better understanding of the characteristics of the product and also learn about other customers’ experience with the product. Drawing upon Elaboration Likelihood Model, this research investigates the predictors of readership and helpfulness of OCR. Our findings show that ...

This paper explores the effects of emotions embedded in a seller review on its perceived helpfulness to readers. Drawing on frameworks in literature on emotion and cognitive processing, we propose that over and above a well-known negativity bias, the impact of discrete emotions in a review will vary, and that one source of this variance is reader perceptions of reviewers’ cognitive effort. We f...

In this paper we consider models for predicting the helpfulness rating of Amazon book reviews. We examine features such as the review’s star rating, the length of the review text, the readability of the review text, and the amount of comparisons made in the review. We compare Support Vector Machine and Random Forests models both for regression and classification.

Preprints play an important role in scholarly conversation. This paper examines perceptions of preprints through the lens students using a simulated Google environment. Data were collected from 116 high school, community college, undergraduate, and graduate with attention toward helpfulness, credibility, identification preprints. Findings show preprint peer-reviewed cues little to no judging he...

When evaluating the helpfulness of online reviews, review valence is a particularly relevant factor. This research argues that the influence of review valence is highly dependent on its consistency with the valence of other available reviews. Using both field and experimental data, this paper show that consistent reviews are perceived asmore helpful than inconsistent reviews, independent of the...

This paper explores effects of the emotions embedded in a seller review on its perceived helpfulness. Drawing on frameworks from the emotion and cognitive processing literatures, the authors propose that although emotional review content is subject to a well-known negativity bias, the effects of discrete emotions will vary, and that one source of this variance is perceptions of reviewers’ cogni...