Abstract
Online review helpfulness has always sparked a heated discussion among academics and practitioners. Despite the fact that research has extensively examined the impacts of review title and content on perceptions of online review helpfulness, the underlying mechanism of how the similarities between a review' title and content may affect review helpfulness has been rarely explored. Based on mere exposure theory, a research model reflecting the influences of title-content similarity and sentiment consistency on review helpfulness was developed and empirically examined by using data collected from 127,547 product reviews on Amazon.com. The TF-IDF and the cosine of similarity were used for measuring the text similarity between review title and review content, and the Tobit model was used for regression analysis. The results showed that the title-content similarity positively affected review helpfulness. In addition, the positive effect of title-content similarity on review helpfulness is increased when the title-content sentiment consistency is high. The title sentiment also negatively moderates the impact of the title-content similarity on review helpfulness. The present research can help online retailers identify the most helpful reviews and, thus, reduce consumers' search costs as well as assist reviewers in contributing more valuable online reviews.
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