Essays on information perception of online reviews

Abstract

With the increasing popularity of online reviews, understanding the consumer perception of online reviews is of great importance. While existing literatures fall short in investigating the impact of reviews’ textual content, this thesis aims to supplement the prior scholarly works to investigate the value of online review content. The thesis consists of three essays on the information perception of product review content from different perspectives. The first essay investigates the impact aggregated opinions on consumers’ perception of online reviews. It has found that consumers’ preference in review information is highly subjected to the review context, where aggregated opinions from existing reviews, in together with consumers’ prior expectation, consensus salience and sample representativeness, would shape the process of review perception. Acknowledging the power of review content, the second essay seeks to provide a new approach for clustering product utilizing consumer perception of review helpfulness across a variety of products. By using multiple text-mining tools, random forest and clustering algorithms, our study suggests three perception schemas and the corresponding product clusters by mining the reviews from a large online marketplace. To investigate the role of expert reviews for high-involvement product purchases, the third essay targets on multi-attribute products and aims to quantify the role of expert review content on shaping consumers’ perception process towards review expertise, trustworthiness as well as helpfulness. The analyses suggest the value of expert review content in building up the two distinct and supplementary credibility dimensions, expertise and trustworthiness, both of which further shape the helpfulness perception of reviews. In sum, the three essays join and supplement the large volume of studies in online reviews by deriving the value of review content. They together provide implications for both researchers and practitioners in further utilizing and managing the impact of user-generated content in online communications.