 This product works well (for me): The impact of first-person singular pronouns on online review helpfulnessFang Wang and Sahar Karimi Journal of Business Research, 2019, vol. 104, issue C, 283-294 Abstract: Can linguistic choices of reviewers, such as using first-person singular pronouns (FPSP), affect readers' perception of information helpfulness? When sharing their purchase and consumption experiences, online reviewers tend to excessively use FPSP to refer to themselves. However, the effect of this language choice on readers' perception of information value is unknown. Drawing on communication and psycholinguistic literatures, this research theoretically develops and empirically analyzes the effects of the use of FPSP on perceived review helpfulness. The empirical results, based on a sample of 41,656 reviews from Amazon.com, suggest that the use of these pronouns has a negative impact on the perceived helpfulness of online reviews. In addition, such effects are moderated by review attributes such as length, valence and affective content, being more prominent for shorter reviews, reviews with lower valence and higher level of affect. Keywords: Online reviews; Text analysis; Electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM); Perceived helpfulness; First-person singular pronoun; Elaboration likelihood model (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:jbrese:v:104:y:2019:i:c:p:283-294 DOI: 10.1016/j.jbusres.2019.07.028 Access Statistics for this article Journal of Business Research is currently edited by A. G. Woodside More articles in Journal of Business Research from Elsevier |
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