Search results

This study aims to compare online review characteristics, review length and review sentiment score between “organic” and “regular” food products. In addition, variations in the consumer sentiment scores across the review lengths are studied.

This study fits into the descriptive research design. From Amazon’s website, the consumer product reviews are scrapped. Using the text analytical package “sentiment” in R-Studio, we computed the sentiment scores and counted the number of words in each review. The mean sentiment scores and mean review length are compared for regular and organic products using one-way ANOVA. Sentiment score variation across review length and product class is studied through factorial ANOVA. Sample reviews of ghee and honey are used to test the hypotheses.

The review length shows a significant difference between the regular and organic products. The mean number of words in the regular products reviews is significantly lower than the mean number of words in the organic product reviews. The regular products’ mean sentiment score is significantly lower than the mean sentiment score of organic products. The mean sentiment scores are not consistent between ghee and honey. Sentiment scores are better for organic honey and regular ghee products. For regular ghee products, longer reviews result in lower sentiment scores. For regular and organic versions of honey, longer reviews are associated with better sentiment scores.

This study did not include the helpfulness of a review and the demographic data of the reviewers.

Sentiment scores’ variations across the regular and organic and product categories such as ghee and honey give a comprehensive feedback to the firms. It also indirectly communicates a brand’s evaluation by the consumers and the performance feedback for an upward extension like the organic category.

Studies on organic category give feedback for environment-friendly products and consumer attitude shift towards safer products.

Very limited studies have reported the upward line extensions. The authors study the upward line extension organic and associated sentiment scores variation. The role of review length and its systematic influence on the sentiment scores, variations in the review due to the product nature (organic/regular) are unique contributions of this study.

Consumers’ evaluation of online review helpfulness has been widely examined. The extant literature suggests that the attributes of review content (e.g. review length and extremity) influence review helpfulness. However, review length cannot fully reflect the richness of the review content. Anchoring on information diagnosticity and extremity bias, this study aims to explore the effect of review comprehensiveness on its helpfulness.

Field observations were obtained from 11,812 online restaurant reviews on a popular restaurant review platform. A controlled experiment was conducted to further delineate the effect of review comprehensiveness.

Review comprehensiveness moderates the effects of review length and an extremely negative review on helpfulness. It also confirms that for reviews of the same length, one covering more aspects is perceived by consumers as more helpful.

Different aspects of information in a review can efficiently assist decision-making. The results suggest that review platforms can better design their interface by providing separate areas for different product aspects. The platform can then receive more comprehensive and helpful reviews and increase the diagnosticity of these.

The study enriches the literature by introducing review comprehensiveness and examining the joint effects of review length and comprehensiveness on helpfulness. It also contributes to the literature by indicating how to reduce the effect of review extremity.

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.

Online reviews in online health communities (OHCs) have been a vital information source for patients. The extant literature on the bias effects of helpful reviews mainly concentrates on traditional e-commerce, whereas research on OHCs is still rare. Thus, based on the heuristic-systematic model (HSM), this research explores how two unique reviewer characteristics in OHCs, which may induce attribution bias and confirmation bias, affect review helpfulness and how review length moderates these relationships.

This research analyzed 130,279 reviews collected from haodf.com (one of the representative OHCs in China) by adopting the negative binomial regression to test our research model.

The results indicate that reviewer cured status positively influences review helpfulness, whereas reviewer recommendation source negatively affects review helpfulness. Moreover, the effects of the two reviewer cues on review helpfulness will be weaker for longer reviews.

First, as one of the initial attempts, the current study investigates the effects of confirmation bias and attribution bias of online reviews in OHCs by exploring the effects of two unique reviewer characteristics on review helpfulness. Second, the weakening moderating effects of review length on the two bias effects provide empirical support for the theoretical arguments of the HSM in OHCs.

The purpose of this paper is twofold: first, to identify and validate reviews’ length and sentiment as correlates of online reviews’ ratings; and second, to understand the emotions embedded in online reviews and how they associate with specific words used in such reviews.

A panel data set of customer reviews was collected for auto, life, and home insurance from January 2012 to December 2015 using a web scraping technique. Using a sentiment analysis approach, 1,584 reviews for the auto, home, and life insurance services of 156 insurance companies were analyzed.

The results indicate that, since 2013, consumers have generally had more negative emotions than positive ones toward insurance services. The results also show that consumer review sentiment correlates positively and review length correlates negatively with consumer online review ratings. Furthermore, a two-way ANOVA analysis shows that, in general, short reviews with positive sentiment are associated with high review ratings.

The findings of this study provide service companies, in general, and insurance companies, in particular, with important guidelines that should be considered to increase consumers’ positive attitude toward their services.

This paper highlights the importance of sentiment analysis in identifying consumer reviews’ emotions and understanding the associations and interactions of reviews’ length and sentiment on online review rating, which can lead to improved marketing strategies.

The length of stay (LoS) is of major importance from the perspective of the management of tourist destinations. As tourists heavily rely on the online reviews of other travelers as a primary information source, this study aims to empirically examine how the LoS can influence the online reviews for hotels, with special emphasis on the textual review content.

This study analyzes online review data collected from Booking.com by using the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count program to operationalize review depth, analytical thinking and the authenticity reflected in customer reviews. Based on the analyzed data, this study used a series of regression analyses to understand the impacts of the LoS on online reviews.

The author’s analysis found that a longer stay at a hotel causes consumers to be more likely to post online reviews that not only include a numerical rating as well as written content but also lengthier and more detailed descriptions of their hotel experiences. Further analysis found that the LoS at hotels causes systematic differences in the linguistic attributes of the review content. Specifically, consumers who stay longer tend to write reviews with more analytical information, resulting in consumers perceiving the online reviews as more authentic.

Although the LoS has been considered a significant issue in tourism, studies examining the impact of different lengths of stay on consumers’ post-purchase behaviors are limited. In this light, the author’s findings demonstrate how the LoS can change the linguistic attributes of online reviews. It expands the body of knowledge of the LoS in tourism.

This study represents the first attempt to empirically examine and reveal how the different length of stay at a hotel systemically influences consumer review-posting behaviors.

Against the background of industrialisation and modernisation of agriculture, food production issues and environmental hazards have become more and more obvious and consumers are increasingly concerned about food safety and health, which is strengthening demand for organic food. E-commerce provides a new channel for sales. Research on consumer trust in online organic food sales is the basis of network marketing. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

A laboratory experiment was used to empirically test the effects of media richness on consumers’ trust and the moderating effect of online review length. A 2×2 factorial design (i.e. two types of online product presentation formats (between-subject)×two levels of online review lengths (between-subject)) was used.

Media richness has a significant positive effect on consumers’ trust and that this effect is moderated by online review length. Meanwhile, perceived risk conveys the interaction effect of the media richness of online product presentation and online review length to trust.

E-commerce websites should aim to promote organic food by using a variety of online product presentation formats and by presenting high quality online reviews in order to reduce consumers’ perceived risk and improve their degree of trust when buying online.

This paper provides a new insight into consumers’ attitude of buying organic food online. The results of the research could provide proposals for promoting organic food sales online.

This paper aims to offer a framework explaining how product experience (i.e. think vs feel) and product involvement (high vs low) influence the helpfulness of online reviews. It also reexamined how online consumer review dimensions help to build online review helpfulness under different contexts.

Data were collected using content analysis on 1,200 online customer reviews on 12 products from four categories to measure the relationships between online review dimensions and the helpfulness of reviews. The regression analysis and analysis of variance (ANOVA) were used to test the hypotheses.

The findings indicate that the effectiveness of length of a review is moderated by product type; for think products, longer reviews yield higher helpfulness. Furthermore, the level of consistency between individual review ratings and overall product ratings is associated with review helpfulness. The length of product descriptions and product ratings is moderated by the level of involvement. For products with high involvement, longer descriptions yield higher helpfulness.

A conceptual connection to customer interaction is proposed by online customer reviews that vary by product type. The findings provide implications for online retailers to better manage online customer reviews and increase the value of product ratings.

Online reviewers' identity information is an essential cue by which consumers judge reviews on ecommerce platforms. However, few studies have explored how prior anonymous reviews and focal reviews affect reviewers' preference for anonymity. The purpose of this paper is to investigate why reviewers seek anonymity in terms of prior anonymous reviews and focal reviews.

Based on restaurant reviews collected from meituan.com, one of the largest group-buying ecommerce platforms in China, this study employed logistic regression to examine how prior anonymous reviews and focal reviews are associated with reviewers' preference for anonymity.

Results show that the volume and sequence of prior anonymous review are positively associated with the likelihood of reviewers' preference for anonymity, whereas focal review valence is negatively correlated with this preference. Focal review length is positively correlated with reviewers' preference for anonymity but negatively moderates the roles of review valence and prior anonymous reviews on this preference.

This study expands the information disclosure literature by exploring determinants of user identity disclosure from a reviewer perspective. This research also offers a methodological contribution by employing a more accurate measure to calculate reviewers' preference for anonymity, enhancing the empirical results. Lastly, this work supplements the online review literature on how prior anonymous reviews and focal reviews are associated with reviewers' identity disclosure.

The purpose of this paper is to reveal a symbol – “however” that authors are very interested in, but few research studies pay attention to the existing literature. The authors aim to further insight its function.

In this research, the authors selected 3,329 valid comments on articles published in the British Medical Journal (BMJ) from 2015 to 2020 as the research objects. The authors showed the length distribution of reviewers' comments. In what follows, the authors analyzed the general distribution of words in comments and reviewer comments’ position to understand reviewers' comments qualitatively in word dimension. Specially, the authors analyzed functions of “however” and “but”, words that authors are most concerned with. In addition, the authors also discussed some factors, which may be related to “however,” that reflect reviewers' praise through regression analysis.

The authors found that there are marked differences in the length of reviewers' comments under different review rounds. By mapping the reviewers' comments to different sections, the authors found that reviewers are deeply concerned to methods section. Adjectives and adverbs in comments written in different sections of the manuscripts also have different characteristics. The authors tried to interpret the turning function of “however” in scientific communication. Its frequency of use is related to reviewers' identities, specifically academic status. More precisely, junior researchers use “however” in praise more frequently than senior researchers do.

The linguistic feature and function of “however” and “but” in the reviewers' comments of the rejected manuscripts may be different from accepted papers and also worth exploring. Regrettably, the authors cannot obtain the peer review comments of rejected manuscripts. This point may limit the conclusion of the investigation of this article.

Overall, the survey results revealed some language features of reviewers' comments, which could provide a basis of future endeavors for many reviewers in open peer review (OPR) field. Specially, the authors also put forward an interesting symbol to examine the review comments, “however”, for the first time.