What Drives the Helpfulness of Online Product Reviews? From Stars to Facts and Emotions

For consumers, online product reviews have become an important source for product-related information. Furthermore, they represent a beneficial addition to online retailers’ websites. Due to the increasing amount of available product reviews, identifying the most helpful product reviews represents an important task in order to reduce information overload. Therefore, the factors influencing review helpfulness have to be identified. Thus, in order to explain Review helpfulness, we build upon and extend review diagnosticity theory with concepts from marketing research and propose a research model that includes product quality, review sentiment and review uncertainty. Based on a sample of amazon.com product reviews, we evaluate our research model and find that statements about product quality positively influence review helpfulness. Furthermore, we identify that sentiment as well as uncertainty expressed in product reviews have an impact on review helpfulness. Finally, we confirm that the product category has a moderating effect on these relationships

Proceedings der 11. Internationalen Tagung Wirtschaftsinformatik (WI2013) - Band 1

The two volumes represent the proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Wirtschaftsinformatik WI2013 (Business Information Systems). They include 118 papers from ten research tracks, a general track and the Student Consortium. The selection of all submissions was subject to a double blind procedure with three reviews for each paper and an overall acceptance rate of 25 percent. The WI2013 was organized at the University of Leipzig between February 27th and March 1st, 2013 and followed the main themes Innovation, Integration and Individualization.:Track 1: Individualization and Consumerization Track 2: Integrated Systems in Manufacturing Industries Track 3: Integrated Systems in Service Industries Track 4: Innovations and Business Models Track 5: Information and Knowledge ManagementDie zweibändigen Tagungsbände zur 11. Internationalen Tagung Wirtschaftsinformatik (WI2013) enthalten 118 Forschungsbeiträge aus zehn thematischen Tracks der Wirtschaftsinformatik, einem General Track sowie einem Student Consortium. Die Selektion der Artikel erfolgte nach einem Double-Blind-Verfahren mit jeweils drei Gutachten und führte zu einer Annahmequote von 25%. Die WI2013 hat vom 27.02. - 01.03.2013 unter den Leitthemen Innovation, Integration und Individualisierung an der Universität Leipzig stattgefunden.:Track 1: Individualization and Consumerization Track 2: Integrated Systems in Manufacturing Industries Track 3: Integrated Systems in Service Industries Track 4: Innovations and Business Models Track 5: Information and Knowledge Managemen

Explaining U.S. consumer behavior with news sentiment

We introduce a novel dataset with a news sentiment index that was constructed from a selection of over 300,000 newspaper articles from five of the top ten U.S. newspapers by circulation. By constructing ARMA models, we show that news and consumer sentiment, when combined with other macroeconomic variables, achieve statistically significant results to explain changes in private consumption. We make three distinct findings with respect to sentiment in consumption behavior models: first, both consumer and news sentiment add explanatory power and statistical significance to conventional consumer behavior models. Second, consumer sentiment, measured by the University of Michigan Index of Consumer Sentiment, adds more explanatory power and statistical significance than news sentiment when tested individually. Third, news sentiment is able to determine the signs of all coefficients in the model correctly, whereas consumer sentiment does not. In general, we conclude that news sentiment is a useful variable to add in consumer behavior models, especially when coupled with consumer sentiment and other macroeconomic variables. Tested individually, news sentiment is as good a proxy as personal income for explaining private consumption growth when tested individually