The carrot and the stick in online reviews: determinants of un-/helpfulness voting choices

Filipe Sengo Furtado (), Thomas Reutterer () and Nadine Schröder ()
Additional contact information
Filipe Sengo Furtado: WU Vienna University of Economics and Business
Thomas Reutterer: WU Vienna University of Economics and Business
Nadine Schröder: WU Vienna University of Economics and Business

Journal of Business Economics, 2022, vol. 92, issue 4, No 3, 565-590

Abstract: 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 of review helpfulness. Using a hurdle regression setup for both helpfulness and unhelpfulness voting behavior, we aim to disentangle the differential effects of what drives reviews to receive any votes, how many votes they receive and whether these effects differ for helpful against unhelpful review voting behavior. As potential driving factors we include reviews’ star rating deviations from the average rating (as a proxy for confirmation bias), the level of controversy among reviews and review sentiment (consistency of review content), as well as pricing information in our analysis. Albeit with opposite effect signs, we find that revealed review un-/helpfulness is consistently guided by the tonality (i.e., the sentiment of review texts) and that reviewers tend to be less critical for lower priced products. However, we find only partial support for a confirmation bias with differential effects for the level of controversy on helpfulness versus unhelpfulness review votings. We conclude that the effects of voting disagreement are more complex than previous literature suggests and discuss implications for research and management practice.

Keywords: Online review; (Un)helpfulness; Hurdle model; Confirmation bias; Price levels; Asymmetric effects (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: M31 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s11573-021-01044-x Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

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:spr:jbecon:v:92:y:2022:i:4:d:10.1007_s11573-021-01044-x

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/journal/11573

DOI: 10.1007/s11573-021-01044-x

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Business Economics is currently edited by Günter Fandel

More articles in Journal of Business Economics from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().