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This article aims to advance a new theoretical perspective on the basis of prosumption theory, namely, that online review platforms can be conceptualized as prosumer communities (and online reviews as prosumer-generated content). This perspective meshes with message tuning research to suggest specific mechanisms through which peer-to-peer prosumption takes place in online review communities. Overall, this article enriches and deepens theoretical understanding of prosumption behavior in the product review context and offers practical advice for inducing high-value, prosumer-generated content in online communities.

Exploratory observations of current practices across a wide spectrum of review platforms were conducted. The observed platforms include independent review sites (e.g. Yelp) and review sites affiliated with e-tailers (e.g. Amazon), general review sites (e.g. Viewpoints) and product-specific review sites (e.g. Healthgrades), large-scale review sites (e.g. TripAdvisor) and review sites of a smaller scale (e.g. Judy’s Book) and review sites based in different geographic regions, including Australia (e.g. Productreview.com.au), China (e.g. Taobao), Europe (e.g. Reevoo), India (e.g. Zomato) and North America (e.g. Foursquare).

Theoretical analysis suggests that high-quality review content is the result of collaborative prosumption characterized by three distinct value-adding processes: history-based message tuning, audience-based message tuning and norm-based message tuning. In-depth observations reveal that today’s review platforms are leveraging these value-adding processes to varying degrees. The overwhelming diversity of the observed platform features points to the need for more research on platform design and management.

This research identifies three distinct dimensions of review quality – novelty, relevancy and congruency – that can be systematically managed through platform design. The exploratory nature of this research necessitates follow-up work to further investigate how high-quality review content emerges in the historical, interpersonal and cultural contexts of online prosumer communities.

The prosumption-inducing mechanisms identified in this research have major consumer welfare and strategy implications. First, they may lead to novel, relevant and congruent consumer reviews. Second, they may enhance the value of brand communities (which rely heavily on collaborative prosumption).

This research addresses two intriguing questions pertinent to marketing theory and practice in the digital era. First, how do high-quality reviews emerge on product review platforms (which consist of ordinary consumers)? Second, what constitutes high-quality review content and how can platform managers facilitate the collaborative creation of high-quality review content by ordinary consumers?

Although considerable evidence shows that online product reviews (OPRs) can greatly affect consumers, how interface designs of OPR systems (i.e. websites where consumers read and write OPRs) impact online buying behavior has not yet been well investigated. Using research on confidence in judgment and the Stimulus-Organism-Response (SOR) framework, this study aims to develop a model of the effects of OPR system design on consumer purchase behavior.

A study using a two by two by two factorial experimental design was conducted. The structural model with AMOS 23 based on 319 useable data points was tested.

Findings are very interesting. First, designs that manipulate positions of reviews impact perceived value but surprisingly have no effects on confidence in judgment. Second, designs using default display order based on helpfulness votes rather than on recency of reviews increase confidence to a higher level. Third, although unstructured organization methods are used by many major OPR systems, they are inferior in enhancing consumers’ emotional reactions to structured ones.

This paper highlights the need for more academic research on how interface designs of online product review systems impact purchase behavior. Additionally, this study emphasizes the need for examining how confidence in judgment is impacted in the online environment.

For practitioners, this research provides them with design implications on how to increase consumer purchase behavior.

This research enhances the understanding of the effects of OPR system interface design on purchase behavior. In addition, the current paper sheds light on how confidence in judgment, given its importance in reducing online consumer’s hesitance to buy, is impacted by various interface designs of OPR systems. Furthermore, this study applies the SOR framework to the context of OPR system designs.

This study aims to formulate a new framework for identifying deception in consumer reviews through the lens of interpersonal deception theory (IDT) and the persuasion knowledge model (PKM). It evaluates variables contributing to consumer intentions to purchase after reading deceptive reviews and proposes deception identification cues to be incorporated into the interpersonal communication theoretical framework.

The first study is qualitative and quantitative, based on sentiment and lexical analysis of 1,000 consumer reviews. The second study uses the US national consumer survey with a partial least squares partial least squares-structural equation modeling and a process-based mediation–moderation analysis.

This study shows deceptive characteristics that cannot be dissimulated by reviewing consumers that represent review legitimacy based on review valence, authenticity, formalism and analytical writing. The results also support the central role of consumer suspicion of an ulterior motive, with a direct and mediation effect regarding consumer emotions and intentions, including brand trust and purchase intentions.

This paper presents a new framework for identifying deception in consumer reviews based on IDT and PKM, adding new theoretical elements that help adapt these theories to written digital communication specificities. This study clarifies the role of suspicion in a deceptive communication context and shows the variables contributing to consumers’ purchase intention after reading deceptive reviews. The results also emphasize the benefits of lexical analysis in identifying deceptive characteristics of reviews.

Companies can consider the vulnerability of certain generations based on lower levels of suspicions and different linguistic cues to detect deception in reviews. Long-term, marketers can also implement deception identification practices as potential new business models and opportunities.

Policymakers and regulators need to consider critical deception cues and the differences in suspicion levels among segments of consumers in the formulation of preventative and deception management measures.

This study contributes to the literature by formulating a new framework for identifying deception in consumer reviews, adapted to the characteristics of written digital communication. This study emphasizes deception cues in electronic word-of-mouth and provides additional opportunities for theorizing deception in electronic communication.

The purpose of this study was to investigate consumer preference formation in presence of reviews coming from traditional and electronic word of mouth (eWOM) under different conditions of review valence.

Scenario-based experimental design was used for this study. A total of 172 respondents were randomly assigned across four experimental scenarios and a control group. Across-groups comparisons were conducted using post hoc Dunnett’s test for checking the hypothesis.

The study revealed that negativity bias impacted consumer judgement formation to such an extent that positive valence from higher credibility source (WOM) is over-powered by negative reviews from lesser trusted source (eWOM). Further, a negative valence review from higher credibility source (WOM) may not be countered even in presence of consensus of positive valence review coming from a higher number of positive eWOM.

This study contributes to existing literature by examining consumer preference behaviour in presence of reviews coming from traditional and eWOM under different conditions of review valence. While earlier studies have examined individual role of WOM and eWOM under differing valence conditions, this paper extends literature by studying combined effect of WOM and eWOM under different review valence.

Do consumers rate reviews describing other consumers' sensory experience of a product (touch, smell, sight, hear and taste) as helpful or do they rate reviews describing more practical properties (product performance and characteristics/features) as more helpful? What is the effect of review helpfulness on purchase intention? Furthermore, why do consumers perceive sensory and non-sensory reviews differently? This study answers these questions.

The authors analyze 447,792 Amazon reviews and perform a topic modeling analysis to extract the main topics that consumers express in their reviews. Then, the topics were used as regressors to predict the number of consumers who found the review helpful. Finally, a lab experiment was conducted to replicate the results in a more controlled environment to test the serial mediation effect.

Contrary to the overwhelming evidence supporting the positive effects of sensory elicitation in marketing, this study shows that sensory reviews are less likely to be helpful than non-sensory reviews. Moreover, a key reason why sensory reviews are less effective is that they decrease the objective perception of the review, a less objective review then decreases the level of helpfulness, which decreases purchase intention.

This study contributes to the interactive marketing field by investigating customer behavior and interactivity in online shopping sites and to the sensory marketing literature by identifying a boundary condition, the authors’ data suggest that sensory elicitations might not be processed positively by consumers when they are not directly experienced, but instead communicated by another consumer. Moreover, this study indicates how companies can encourage consumers to share more effective and helpful reviews.

It has always been a hot topic for online retailers to obtain consumers’ product evaluations from massive online reviews. In the process of online shopping, there is no face-to-face interaction between online retailers and customers. After collecting online reviews left by customers, online retailers are eager to acquire answers to some questions. For example, which product attributes will attract consumers? Or which step brings a better experience to consumers during the process of shopping? This paper aims to associate the latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) model with the consumers’ attitude and provides a method to calculate the numerical measure of consumers’ product evaluation expressed in each word.

First, all possible pairs of reviews are organized as a document to build the corpus. After that, latent topics of the traditional LDA model noted as the standard LDA model, are separated into shared and differential topics. Then, the authors associate the model with consumers’ attitudes toward each review which is distinguished as positive review and non-positive review. The product evaluation reflected in consumers’ binary attitude is expanded to each word that appeared in the corpus. Finally, a variational optimization is introduced to calculate parameters mentioned in the expanded LDA model.

The experiment’s result illustrates that the LDA model in the research noted as an expanded LDA model, can successfully assign sufficient probability with words related to products attributes or consumers’ product evaluation. Compared with the standard LDA model, the expanded model intended to assign higher probability with words, which have a higher ranking within each topic. Besides, the expanded model also has higher precision on the prediction set, which shows that breaking down the topics into two categories fits better on the data set than the standard LDA model. The product evaluation of each word is calculated by the expanded model and depicted at the end of the experiment.

This research provides a new method to calculate consumers’ product evaluation from reviews in the level of words. Words may be used to describe product attributes or consumers’ experiences in reviews. Assigning words with numerical measures can analyze consumers’ products evaluation quantitatively. Besides, words are labeled themselves, they can also be ranked if a numerical measure is given. Online retailers can benefit from the result for label choosing, advertising or product recommendation.

Online consumer reviews are increasingly used by third-party e-commerce organizations to shed light on the positive and negative sides of the brands they sell. However, the large number of consumer reviews requires these organizations to shortlist the most helpful ones to cope with information overload. A growing number of scholars have been investigating the determinants of review helpfulness; however, little is known about the influence of cultural factors in consumer's evaluation of review helpfulness.

This study has adopted Hofstede's cultural values framework to assess the influence of cultural factors on review helpfulness. We used a sample of 570,669 reviews of 851 hotels published by reviewers from 81 countries on Booking.com.

Findings reveal that reviewers from cultural contexts that score high on power distance, individualism, masculinity, uncertainty avoidance and indulgence are more likely to write helpful reviews.

This is one of the first cross-cultural studies in marketing using a big data approach in examining how users of reviews from different countries evaluate the helpfulness of online reviews.

Despite skepticism, consumers rely on online reviews for their purchase decisions. However, academics mostly argue that skepticism has an inverse relationship with consumer decision-making. This study aims to investigate the relationship among skepticism, reliance and consumer purchase decisions in an online review context. It also investigates the moderating role of review self-efficacy and regulatory focus in the relationship between skepticism and reliance on online reviews.

A survey with a nationally representative sample and two experimental studies are conducted.

Skepticism negatively affects consumers’ reliance on online reviews and reliance on online reviews mediates the relationship between skepticism and review-based purchase decisions. High review self-efficacy participants tend to rely more on online reviews than low review self-efficacy participants. Promotion-focused people rely more on online reviews than prevention-focused people, despite similar levels of skepticism.

The findings contribute to the skepticism, self-efficacy and regulatory focus literature. The general framework of the relationship among skepticism, reliance and purchase decision is also applicable in an online review context.

The results provide evidence of a stronger reliance on online reviews of high review self-efficacy and promotion-oriented consumers compared to low review self-efficacy and prevention-oriented consumers.

Despite the growing consensus that consumers extensively use online reviews and that negative reviews can significantly damage brand equity, it remains uncertain whether negative online reviews that focus on different aspects of a service have a similar or differential effect on brand equity. This study aims to fill this gap and explores the mediating role of emotional contagion and what kind of response helps better deter their negative effect.

This research is conducted through a one-panel study and three experimental studies. SAS enterprise miner is used for text mining analysis and Analysis of variance (ANOVA) and Process macro models are used to analyze the experimental data.

Negative reviews related to the tangibility, responsiveness and empathy dimensions have a more detrimental effect on brand equity than negative reviews related to the assurance and reliability dimensions. The results also provide evidence that emotional contagion is more prevalent when consumers read reviews that are specific to the empathy and responsiveness dimensions. Finally, accommodative responses from the service provider are more effective in deterring the effect of a negative online review on brand equity.

The generalizability of this study is limited to the restaurant and hotel industry.

The findings will also help the brand manager in understanding the comparative effect of service quality-specific negative reviews on brand equity and also the type of responses that brand managers should give to negative reviews.

Despite online reviews receiving increased attention in academic research, Service quality (SERVQUAL) dimension-specific reviews have not been studied until now. This study contributes to the service quality-related literature by providing evidence that not all negative online reviews related to different Service quality (SERVQUAL) dimensions equally affect brand equity.

This study developed a new interpretation of the attitude contagion theory, with the information adoption model (IAM) as the theoretical basis. A review of electronic word-of-mouth studies was conducted by using informational and individual determinants to develop an integrated empirical model that identified the antecedents and consequences of consumer attitude toward online reviews.

This study recruited 750 members of Facebook beauty fan pages in Taiwan and used the structural equation model to test research hypotheses.

Results revealed that perceived “ electronic word-of mouth (eWOM) credibility of online reviews” and “product involvement” could be used to explain the effects of attitude toward online reviews. Regarding the attitude contagion effect, the effect of “attitude toward online review” on both “attitude toward a product” and “attitude toward a brand” is stronger than that on “eWOM adoption.”

This paper provides valuable insights into the antecedents, consequences and mediating mechanisms that determine consumer attitude toward online reviews.