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Want Some Help? How Online Reviews Influence Consumer Decision Making

Wang, Yiru
http://orcid.org/0000-0002-9358-7087
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=kent1562159132135793

Abstract Details

2019, PHD, Kent State University, College of Business and Entrepreneurship, Ambassador Crawford / Department of Marketing and Entrepreneurship.
This dissertation explores the effects of online review characteristics on consumers’ information processing and persuasion. Online consumer review is a managerially important topic because consumers trust online reviews and make purchase decisions using online reviews. However, determining what constitutes a persuasive review is challenging since they contain multiple features, some of them unexplored. Moreover, some reviews are fake – when persuasive, these negatively influence consumer decision making. This dissertation addresses these issues by (1) proposing new review content and context features that may drive online review persuasiveness and (2) study how fake reviews can be better labeled by firms, as well as more accurately detected and processed by consumers. The dissertation is organized into three essays. Essay I explores how online review information content drives persuasion. The literature implicitly assumes that online review length is a proxy for information content. This essay disentangles both of these key content features and proposes a new information content metric based on Shannon’s entropy. Two experiments and a secondary data study reveal that information content can be highly persuasive, independent of length, particularly under high purchase uncertainty. Essay II explores how social context features influence online review processing. Research shows that context features, such as website characteristics (i.e., not the content of the review itself) can moderate how such content persuades review readers. The essay studies the effect of two new social features on persuasiveness: (1) how cohesive a website’s community is perceived to be, and (2) whether the reviewed product might be more likely to be used by multiple consumers, which I label "product collaborativeness". I expect that as website cohesiveness and product collaborativeness increases, consumers will be more persuaded by reviewers’ characteristics as opposed to review content. Essay III explores how backstage review content features known to online platforms, but not to users, could indicate review suspiciousness. This essay also explores whether consumers find suspicious reviews useful. I find that consumers rate them less likely to be helpful compared to unsuspicious reviews, indicating that platforms need to take steps to prevent consumers from being misled by suspicious reviews. To this end, I further conducted a series of experiments, and find that digital nudging via brief visual alerts of suspicious reviews can be more effective than deleting them quietly, which is the current strategy of most platforms. In addition, I also explore digital nudging framing to maximize the effectiveness of this tactic.
Cesar Zamudio (Committee Co-Chair)
Jennifer Wiggins (Committee Co-Chair)
Robert Jewell (Committee Member)
Mary Hogue (Committee Member)
131 p.
Marketing
Online consumer reviews; Review content features; Review context features; Suspicious online review

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Wang, Y. (2019). Want Some Help? How Online Reviews Influence Consumer Decision Making [Doctoral dissertation, Kent State University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=kent1562159132135793

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Wang, Yiru. Want Some Help? How Online Reviews Influence Consumer Decision Making . 2019. Kent State University, Doctoral dissertation. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=kent1562159132135793.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Wang, Yiru. "Want Some Help? How Online Reviews Influence Consumer Decision Making ." Doctoral dissertation, Kent State University, 2019. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=kent1562159132135793

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)

kent1562159132135793
556
© 2019, some rights reserved.Creative Commons License Want Some Help? How Online Reviews Influence Consumer Decision Making by Yiru Wang is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. Based on a work at etd.ohiolink.edu.
This open access ETD is published by Kent State University and OhioLINK.