A Novel Approach to Predict the Helpfulness of Online Reviews

Online reviews help consumers reduce uncertainty and risks faced in purchase decision making by providing information about products and services. However, the overwhelming amount of data continually being produced in online review platforms introduce a challenge for customers to read and judge the reviews. This research addresses the problem of misleading and overloaded information by developing a novel approach to predict the helpfulness of online reviews. The proposed approach in this study, first, clusters reviews using reviewer-related, and temporal factors. It then uses review-related factors to predict online review helpfulness in each cluster. Using a sample of Amazon.com reviews, the empirical findings offer strong support to the proposed approach and show its superior predictions of review helpfulness compared to earlier approaches. The outcomes of this study help customers in online shopping and assist online retailers in reducing information overload to improve their customers’ experience

Exploring the Relationship between Influencers’ Sentiment and Cryptocurrency Fluctuation through Microblogs

Scholars and practitioners increasingly recognize the importance of microblogs in capturing eWord of Mouth (eWoM) and their predictive power for cryptocurrency markets. This research in progress paper examines the extent to which microblog messages are related to bitcoin fluctuation. Building on information systems and finance literature, we examine the interactions between influencers’ extreme sentiment and the bitcoin fluctuation using natural language processing techniques and hypothesis testing. Our preliminary results show when influencers express extreme sentiment, in favour or against bitcoin, it is less likely that their tweets are related to future bitcoin fluctuation. However, when their extreme tweets are in-depth and unique, this negative relationship is moderated. Overall, our findings reveal that influencers’ sentiment is an important predictor in determining bitcoin fluctuation, but not all tweets are of equal impact. This study offers new insights into social media and its role in the cryptocurrency market

Moderating Effects of Time-Related Factors in Predicting the Helpfulness of Online Reviews: a Deep Learning Approach

Given the importance of online reviews, as shown by extensive research, we address the problem of predicting the helpfulness of online product reviews by developing a comprehensive research model guided by the theoretical foundations of signaling and social influence theories. We use review order and time interval to incorporate the moderating effects of the time-related variable on the reviewer’s valuation of products and the related details they provide. Applying deep learning techniques in text processing and model building on a dataset of 239297 reviews, the empirical findings represent strong support of the proposed approach and show its superior performance in predicting review helpfulness compared to current approaches. This research contributes to theory by analyzing online reviews from the points of two well-known information processing theories and contributes to practice by developing a model to sort the newly posted reviews

Towards explaining user satisfaction with contact tracing mobile applications in a time of pandemic: a text analytics approach

This research project investigates the critical phenomenon of the post-adoption use of Contact Tracing Mobile Applications (CTMAs) in a time of pandemic. A panel data set of customer reviews was collected from March 2020 to June 2021. Using sentiment analysis, topic modeling and dictionary-based analytics, 10,337 reviews were analyzed. The results show that after controlling for review sentiment and length, user satisfaction is associated with users’ perception of utilitarian benefits of CTMA, their CTMA-specific privacy concerns, and installation and use issues. Our methodological approach (using various text analysis techniques for analyzing public feedback) and findings (influential factors on consumers’ satisfaction with CTMA) can inform the design and deployment of the next generation of CTMAs for managing future pandemics

Revisiting Review Depth in Search for Helpful Online Reviews

This study investigates online review features that constitute review depth and assess their impacts on review helpfulness. It develops a model capturing the moderating effects of heuristic and systematic cues of an online review on the relationship between review length and its helpfulness. In particular, this study examines the moderating effects of price, product type, review readability and the presence of two-sided arguments. For testing the model, a dataset of 568,454 reviews from 256,059 different reviewers on Amazon.com were analyzed. The variables were operationalized using test processing techniques and relationships were empirically tested using regression and machine learning models. The results highlight significant moderating effects of review readability and the presence of two-sided arguments on the relationship between review length and its helpfulness. However, the results did not confirm the moderating effects of price and product type. This article discusses the significant implications for a better understanding of review depth and helpfulness in e-commerce platforms