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The purpose of this study is to explore the impact of online reviews on answer adoption in virtual Q&A communities, with an eye toward extending knowledge exchange and community management.

Online reviews contain rich cognitive and emotional information about community members regarding the provided answers. As feedback information on answers, it is crucial to explore how online reviews affect answer adoption. Based on signaling theory, a research model reflecting the influence of online reviews on answer adoption is established and empirically examined by using secondary data with 69,597 Q&A data and user data collected from Zhihu. Meanwhile, the moderating effects of the informational and emotional consistency of reviews and answers are examined.

The negative binomial regression results show that both answer-related signals (informational support and emotional support) and answerers-related signals (answerers’ reputations and expertise) positively impact answer adoption. The informational consistency of reviews and answers negatively moderates the relationships among information support, emotional support and answer adoption but positively moderates the effect of answerers’ expertise on answer adoption. Furthermore, the emotional consistency of reviews and answers positively moderates the effect of information support and answerers’ reputations on answer adoption.

Although previous studies have investigated the impacts of answer content, answer source credibility and personal characteristics of knowledge seekers on answer adoption in virtual Q&A communities, few have examined the impact of online reviews on answer adoption. This study explores the impacts of informational and emotional feedback in online reviews on answer adoption from a signaling theory perspective. The results not only provide unique ideas for community managers to optimize community design and operation but also inspire community users to provide or utilize knowledge, thereby reducing knowledge search costs and improving knowledge exchange efficiency.

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?

The purpose of this paper is to examine the mechanism of how peer review helpfulness evaluation in online review communities is established, drawing upon the internalization and identification routes of persuasion effect.

Based on book reviews selected from Douban.com (a prestigious review community in China), this study used econometric models to investigate the effects of both reviews and reviewers’ characteristics on peer review helpfulness evaluation in review communities.

Review internalization is more persuasive than reviewers’ identification in peer evaluations, in terms of both short and long reviews. Reviews with extreme negative ratings tend to obtain higher level of helpfulness evaluation than those with positive or moderate ratings. The influence of reviewers’ characteristics is a significant cue in helping consumers to establish the trust perception in the context of short reviews, while its function diminishes in the context of long reviews, thus suggesting the importance of reviewers’ identification for short reviews in review communities.

The findings will enhance current understanding of peer review review helpfulness evaluation in online review communities and help practitioners administrate community reviews intelligently, help members write better reviews and customers in their product browsing experience.

First, this study enriches review evaluation research in review communities by demonstrating the importance of internalization and identification lens of persuasion effect when explaining review helpfulness; second, this study helps to confirm the existing findings that reviews with extreme negative ratings are more helpful than those with moderate or positive ratings in review communities; third, this study proposes a new perspective pertaining to the relationship between reviewers’ identification and helpfulness evaluation.

This paper investigates online evaluation processes on peer-to-peer platforms to highlight how online peer evaluation enacts neoliberal subjects and collectives.

The paper uses netnography (Kozinets, 2002) to study the online community of Airbnb. It is also based on 18 interviews, mostly with Airbnb users, and quantitative data about reviews.

Results indicate that peer-to-peer platforms constitute biopolitical infrastructures. They enact and consolidate narcissistic entrepreneurs of the self through evaluation processes and consolidating a for-show community. Specifically, three features make evaluation a powerful neoliberal agent. The object of evaluation shifts from the service to the user's own worth (1). The public nature of the evaluation (2) and symetrical accountability between the evaluator and the evaluatee (3) contribute to excessively positive reviews and this keeps the market fluid.

This paper calls for problematization of the idea of sharing in the so-called “sharing economy”. What is shared on peer-to-peer platforms is the comfort of engaging with people like ourselves.

This paper contributes to the literature on online accounting by extending consideration of evaluation beyond the review process. It also stresses that trust in the evaluative infrastructure is fostered by narcissistic relationships between users, who come to use the platform as a mirror. The peer-to-peer context refreshes the our knowledge on evaluation in a corporate context by highlighting phenomena of standardized spontaneity and euphemized evaluation language. This allows evaluation processes to incorporate a market logic without having to fuel competition.

The purpose of this paper is to explore enablers and constraints in value co-creation in sponsored online communities, and to identify firm roles in shaping value co-creation. The structured analysis is translated into strategies for practitioners and for guiding future research.

The authors systematically review and synthesise the literature to develop a comprehensive model of value co-creation.

The literature review findings have led to the identification of four actors in sponsored online communities, revealed enablers and constraints for value co-creation in online communities, and provided insight into the simultaneous roles of sponsoring firm (co-creator and facilitator) and the interrelationship between them.

Like other systematic literature review studies, the findings are limited by what was reported in the papers selected for the review. The authors contribute to service-dominant logic (SDL) by bridging the macro level to the empirical level, and add to our understanding of the sociomateriality theory by capturing constraints and enablers coming from various actors.

The extracted enablers and constraints guide decision makers to better design, asses, monitor and support sponsored online communities. The findings also inform how to orchestrate the two sponsoring firm roles so that the online community is still attractive for the members and creates value for the sponsoring firm.

Given the variety of disciplines dealing with value co-creation, and given the plenitude of definitions and related concepts, this study consolidates the existing knowledge and models how value is co-created in online communities.

Understanding customers is critical for service researchers and practitioners. Today, customers are increasingly active online, and valuable information about their opinions, experiences and behaviors can be retrieved from a variety of online platforms. Online customer information creates new opportunities to design personalized and high-quality service. This paper aims to review how netnography as a method can help service researchers and practitioners to better use such data.

A systematic review and analysis were conducted on 321 netnography studies published in marketing journals between 1997 and 2017.

The systematic review reveals that netnography has been applied in a variety of ways across different marketing fields and topics. Based on the analysis of existing netnography literature, empirical, theoretical and methodological recommendations for future netnographic service research are presented.

This paper shows how netnography can offer service researchers unprecedented opportunities to access naturalistic online data about customers and, hence, why it is an important method for future service research.

Netnographic research can help service firms with, for example, service innovation, advertising and environmental scanning. This paper provides guidelines for service managers who want to use netnography as a market research tool.

Netnography has seen limited use in service research despite many promising applications in this field. This paper is the first to encourage and support service researchers in their use of the method and aims to stimulate interesting future netnographic service research.

Online reviews have become increasingly important and numerous studies have noted the effect of social factors on the review provision of users. The purpose of this study is to investigate how hometowner contributions, which are defined as prior reviews posted by users from the same city, affect the quality of reviews by focal users.

Based on the theories of competitive altruism, pure altruism and reciprocity, as well as several social influence theories, a conceptual framework is constructed to explain user contribution behavior. In addition, empirical models are established based on 831,737 reviews of 919 hotels on Tripadvisor.

The quality of reviews by hometowners can significantly motivate subsequent users to contribute high-quality reviews. This positive effect is stronger than the effect of previous contributions by non-hometowners. The effect of hometowner contribution is amplified in users with limited review-posting experience and/or in those from countries with a considerable cultural distance from the target destination.

This study provides the hospitality literature with new insights into the effect of social factors on the review provision of users in the context of online hotel review websites. The results also present numerous practical implications for online travel communities.

This study is an early attempt to analyze the effect of prior hometowner contributions on the subsequent contribution decisions of focal users. Thus, this study provides a satisfactory starting point for determining whether the review provision of focal users can be affected differently by prior contributions from their peers from different categories.

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.

In the early days of online communities, researchers tended to view lurkers negatively and considered them illegitimate and peripheral members. However, the tide of opinion about lurkers has gradually become more positive. To take a broad view, lurkers should be included in the knowledge sharing context because while they may not share knowledge directly, they are still stakeholders in online communities who benefit from the knowledge shared. This study aims to review the literature from a knowledge sharing perspective to provide a comprehensive understanding of lurkers in online communities and identify additional reasons behind lurking behavior.

Previous studies that examined reasons behind lurking behavior in the literature were reviewed.

A four-dimensional model is provided, which categorizes the additional reasons for lurking into four domains: individual, social, organizational and technological.

The model serves as a roadmap for future researchers in examining lurkers and lurking behavior. Lurkers should be redefined. De-lurking strategies were suggested following the reasons for lurking behavior in the four-dimensional model, but de-lurking strategies were not recommended in all circumstances. An increase in active lurkers is another option to bring more value to online communities.

Based on self-determination theory (SDT), this study aims to determine the motivation factors of reviewers writing long reviews in the anime industry.

This study analyzes 171,188 online review data collected from an online anime community (MyAnimeList.net).

The findings show that intensity of emotions, experience in writing reviews and helpful votes in past reviews are the most important factors and positively influence review length. The overall rating of the anime moderates the effects of some motivation factors. Moreover, reviewers commenting on their favorite or nonfavorite anime also have varied motivation factors. Furthermore, this study has addressed the p-value problem due to the large sample size.

This study provides a comprehensive and theoretical understanding of reviewers' motivation for writing long reviews.

Online communities can incorporate the insights from this study into website design and motivate reviewers to write long reviews.

Many past studies have investigated what reviews are more helpful. Review length is the most important factor of review helpfulness and positively affects it. However, few studies have examined the determinants of review length. This study attempts to address this issue.