Should Reviewers Stand in the Shoes of Review Readers? The Role of Perspective Taking in Online Reviews

Reviewers can describe their experience with a product or service from their own perspective or from the perspective of review readers (or prospective consumers). The present paper investigates how and why reviewers’ perspective taking may influence review readers’ perception of review helpfulness. Drawing on the perspective taking literature, we posit that reviews that take (vs. do not take) the perspective of prospective consumers are more likely to be perceived helpful, and that this effect can be explained through greater reviewer attractiveness perceived by consumers. In Study 1, real app reviews from Apple’s App Store were collected to examine the relationship between perspective taking and review helpfulness. In Study 2, experimental methodology was utilized to identify and explain the effect of perspective taking in terms of perceived reviewer attractiveness. The findings provide converging evidence for the important role of perspective taking in online reviews

The role of online reviews in consumer decision-making

As a prominent form of user-generated content, online reviews have become increasingly indispensable for consumers to make purchase decisions. Thus, it is critical to understand what sets helpful reviews apart from unhelpful ones, which kinds of reviews consumers prefer to read, and how online reviews shape consumers’ purchase decisions. Prior research has examined diverse determinants of review helpfulness and the effect of summary rating statistics on product sales. However, few studies have examined the impact of reviewers’ writing styles on review helpfulness, explored the critical role of consumers’ initial beliefs before they read and evaluate reviews, or investigated the likelihood of individual reviews to sway consumers’ purchase decisions. Addressing these important gaps and scrutinizing commonly accepted assumptions, my dissertation aims to explore how, why, and when various aspects of online reviews influence consumers’ judgment of review helpfulness, preference in information seeking, and purchase decisions.Ph.D

Positive or Negative Reviews? Consumers’ Selective Exposure in Seeking and Evaluating Online Reviews

How and why positive and negative reviews influence product sales differently has critical implications for both research and businesses. Although earlier online word-of-mouth research empirically documented negative reviews to influence product sales to a greater extent than positive reviews (i.e., a negativity bias), later research revealed positive reviews to be generally more helpful (i.e., a positivity bias). We propose an answer to this puzzle may be that negative reviews get more exposure than positive reviews. As consumers are often overwhelmed by an exploding number of online reviews, they need to be selective when searching for reviews. This research investigates consumers’ preference for positive vs. negative reviews during both the information-seeking and information-evaluation stages of their decision-making process. Drawing on the motivated reasoning literature, we propose that consumers exhibit a negativity bias when they search for reviews to read, but they manifest a confirmation bias when they evaluate the helpfulness of reviews. We conducted three experiments and found consistent support for these hypotheses. Our findings expand the current understanding of consumers’ processing of online reviews to the information-seeking stage, reveal differential biases in different stages, demonstrate a possible explanation for the negativity bias in product sales, and provide important practical implications

I or You: Whom Should Online Reviewers Direct Their Attention To, and When?

Online reviews are pervasive and important in the digital age. However, people may write reviews with different focuses of attention: directed toward themselves or toward future readers. The present paper examines how a focus on future review readers (pr