Is review visibility fostering helpful votes? The role of review rank and review characteristics in the adoption of information

Abstract

In online environments, where consumers usually face information overload, information regarding the number of helpful votes received by online reviews serves as a trust sign to aid consumers in their purchasing journeys. As consumers can only vote for a review as helpful if they have viewed it, the position of the review in the sequence of reviews is likely to influence the number of helpful votes that the review receives. We propose a model in which review helpfulness depends not only on the characteristics of the review and reviewer, but also on its visibility. Review visibility is defined in this study as the probability of a review being viewed by a consumer, and is measured by the inverse rank order of the review in the sequence of reviews at the online retailer when consumers sort reviews according to different criteria (most helpful and most recent). Using a database of 59,526 online reviews from a popular cosmetics online store in the US, we estimate a zero-inflated negative binomial (ZINB) regression and find evidence that review visibility has a strong impact in explaining the likelihood of a review being read by consumers and subsequently voted as helpful by consumers. This effect is even stronger when sorting is most helpful.