The effect of subjectivity and objectivity in online reviews: A convolutional neural network approach

Abstract

AbstractUser reviews are now an essential source of information for consumers, exerting strong influence on purchase decisions. Broadly speaking, reviews rated by consumers as more helpful exert a greater influence downstream. The current research examines how the linguistic characteristics of a review affect its helpfulness score. Using a convolutional neural network (CNN), this research analyzes the linguistic subjectivity and objectivity of over 2 million reviews on Amazon. The results show that, ceteris paribus, both linguistic subjectivity and objectivity have a positive impact on review helpfulness. However, contrary to consumers' intuition, when subjectivity and objectivity are combined in the same review, review helpfulness increases less than their respective separate effects would predict, especially for hedonic products. We conceptualize that this results from the increased complexity of messages mixing subjective and objective sentences, which requires more effortful processing. The findings extend the literature on online reviews, word‐of‐mouth, and text analysis in marketing, and offer practical implications for marketing communication and facilitation of reviews.