Your reviews or mine? Exploring the determinants of “perceived helpfulness” of online reviews: a cross-cultural study

Baidyanath Biswas (), Pooja Sengupta () and Boudhayan Ganguly ()
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Baidyanath Biswas: International Management Institute
Pooja Sengupta: International Management Institute
Boudhayan Ganguly: International Management Institute

Electronic Markets, 2022, vol. 32, issue 3, No 6, 1083-1102

Abstract: Abstract E-commerce platforms allow customers to post online reviews about their products, but many of these reviews remain non-voted by existing customers. Current literature on the perceived helpfulness of online reviews has overlooked the effect of these non-voted reviews. Additionally, current studies lack the cross-cultural perspective to help analyze the influence of cultural factors during an analysis of online reviews in an e-commerce platform. This study proposes a novel cross-cultural framework using online consumer reviews from a global e-commerce retailer to investigate these shortcomings. Our study has twofold contributions: firstly, we identified the significant predictors (such as review-title, review sentiments, star rating, social context, and temporal features) of the count of helpful votes received by online reviews – both voted and non-voted. Secondly, we identified a strong moderating effect of national culture on these predictors during the perception and evaluation of global consumers’ reviews. We also performed a quantile regression across the entire distribution of the count of helpful votes. Findings from our study will guide reviewers who publish helpful and comprehensive reviews. Additionally, customers and sellers from global e-commerce firms will learn to account for cross-cultural differences on the provided features to prevent the distortion of the information content of online reviews.

Keywords: Online consumer reviews; Perceived helpfulness; Zero-inflated poisson distribution; Quantile regression; Hofstede’s cultural framework (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C21 L81 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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DOI: 10.1007/s12525-020-00452-1

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