Online product review as an indicator of users’ degree of innovativeness and product adoption time: a longitudinal analysis of text reviews

Roozmehr Safi and Yang Yu

European Journal of Information Systems, 2017, vol. 26, issue 4, 414-431

Abstract: Online reviews have become extremely valuable sources of information about products and their customers as electronic commerce continues to proliferate rapidly. Previous research has shown that reviews of a product change and evolve over its life. Identifying and understanding patterns of change in reviews and the forces that shape them is an underexplored topic with substantial potential for predicting and improving the market performance of products. In this study, we analyze review text of nearly 50 products over the course of their lives. Our longitudinal analysis of reviews reveals changes in certain personality-related characteristics of buyers in ways that are consistent with the predictions of product adoption and diffusion theories. The main findings and conclusions still hold when we replicate the same procedure on reviews of a different product category. Accordingly, based on online user-generated content in the form of online reviews, this research introduces a novel empirical method for identifying the product adoption and diffusion stage. Implications of the study for theory, methodology, and practice are discussed.

Date: 2017
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1057/s41303-017-0045-2 (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:26:y:2017:i:4:p:414-431

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

DOI: 10.1057/s41303-017-0045-2

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 ().