Analysis of review helpfulness based on consumer perspective

Abstract

When consumers make purchase decisions, they generally refer to the reviews generated by other consumers who have already purchased similar products in order to get more information. Online transaction platforms provide a highly convenient channel for consumers to generate and retrieve product reviews. In addition, consumers can also vote reviews perceived to be helpful in making their decision. However, due to diverse characteristics, consumers can have different preferences on products and reviews. Their voting behavior can be influenced by reviews and existing review votes. To explore the influence mechanism of the reviewer, the review, and the existing votes on review helpfulness, we propose three hypotheses based on the consumer perspective and perform statistical tests to verify these hypotheses with real review data from Amazon. Our empirical study indicates that review helpfulness has significant correlation and trend with reviewers, review valance, and review votes. In this paper, we also discuss the implications of our findings on consumer preference and review helpfulness.