Misreading of consumer dissatisfaction in online product reviews: Writing style as a cause for bias

Michael Antioco and Kristof Coussement ()
Additional contact information
Michael Antioco: EDHEC - EDHEC Business School - UCL - Université catholique de Lille
Kristof Coussement: LEM - Lille économie management - UMR 9221 - UA - Université d'Artois - UCL - Université catholique de Lille - Université de Lille - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique

Post-Print from HAL

Abstract: This study improves our understanding of managers' misreading of negative online reviews. Our findings are derived from a sample of 1014 written online reviews and 507 experienced marketing managers. By building on the judgment-bias literature and psychometric language-style analysis, we find several key results that can ultimately contribute to more effective information management for marketing decisions. Managers tend to better interpret negative reviews when consumers use more cognitive language markers in the form of insight and discrepancy words and more third-person pronouns (i.e., undefined social referents) in their reviews. The inverse relationship exists for the use of causality words and future tenses (i.e., behavioral intentions), as managers tend to underestimate the gravity of the situation under these conditions. Expressions of positive and negative emotions in reviews do not significantly affect managers' readings of negative reviews. Furthermore, more experienced managers and female managers are better at identifying negative reviews, and longer consumer reviews make it more difficult for managers to correctly identify negative reviews.

Keywords: Online consumer review; Post-launch product feedback; Information management; Language-style analysis; Judgment bias (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018-02
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Published in International Journal of Information Management, 2018, 38 (1), pp.301-310. ⟨10.1016/j.ijinfomgt.2017.10.009⟩

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

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:hal:journl:hal-02572087

DOI: 10.1016/j.ijinfomgt.2017.10.009

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Post-Print from HAL
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CCSD ().