Arousal, valence, and volume: how the influence of online review characteristics differs with respect to utilitarian and hedonic products

Jie Ren and Jeffrey V. Nickerson

European Journal of Information Systems, 2019, vol. 28, issue 3, 272-290

Abstract: Online reviews influence consumers’ purchase decisions. Product type – specifically, whether a product is utilitarian or hedonic – can help explain how consumers react to reviews. Characteristics of reviews – in particular, valence, measured by ratings, the arousal level of the language used in the text and the volume of the reviews – provide heuristics that consumers may use in making purchase decisions. Product type moderates the effect of these characteristics. Empirical evidence for this claim comes from multiple sources: a panel data analysis of 26,357 Amazon products and an online experiment with 541 participants. The findings of studies based on this evidence show that product type (hedonic or utilitarian) moderates the effect of the three heuristic attributes of online reviews (valence, volume, and arousal) on sales. The analysis uses OLS-fixed effects models and Granger causality tests. These findings explain why past studies have found that sometimes online review valence is more influential than volume and arousal with respect to sales and why sometimes this is reversed. Our findings have significant theoretical and practical implications for the design of choice architectures in online review systems.

Date: 2019
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (8)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/0960085X.2018.1524419 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:tjisxx:v:28:y:2019:i:3:p:272-290

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/tjis20

DOI: 10.1080/0960085X.2018.1524419

Access Statistics for this article

European Journal of Information Systems is currently edited by Par Agerfalk

More articles in European Journal of Information Systems from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().