Abstract
In this paper, we study the online consumer review generation process by analyzing 37.12 million online reviews across nineteen product categories obtained from Amazon.com. This study revealed that the discrepancy between ratings by others and consumers’ post-purchasing evaluations significantly influenced both the valence and quantity of the reviews that consumers generated. Specifically, a negative discrepancy (‘worse than what I read’) significantly accelerates consumers to write negative reviews (19/19 categories supported), while a positive discrepancy (‘better than what I read’) accelerates consumers to write positive reviews (16/19 categories supported). This implies that others’ ratings play an important role in influencing the review generation process by consumers. More interestingly, we found that this discrepancy significantly influences consumers’ neutral review generation, which is known to amplify the effect of positive or negative reviews by affecting consumers’ search behavior or the credibility of the information. However, this effect is asymmetric. While negative discrepancies lead consumers to write more neutral reviews, positive discrepancies help reduce neutral review generation. Furthermore, our findings provide important implications for marketers who tend to generate fake reviews or selectively generate reviews favorable to their products to increase sales. Doing so may backfire on firms because negative discrepancies can accelerate the generation of objective or negative reviews.
Highlights
The findings are similar to the first-time review model; we found less consistent evidence for the external effect, while the experience effect was supported by all categories
We investigate whether and how the consumers’ online review generation process is influenced by others’ review ratings
We focused on the discrepancy between the evaluations of experienced consumers and anonymous evaluations of others, represented in the online review ratings
Summary
‘I bought this cream because of all the wonderful reviews and was hoping it will help my terribly cracked hands. Discrepancies between others’ evaluations and consumers’ post-purchase evaluations may critically influence the purchase decisions of potential future consumers by motivating experienced consumers to generate more positive, negative, or neutral reviews of the purchased product, depending on the direction of the discrepancy. This effect of others’ evaluations on the online review generation process is a distinctive feature of the electronic WOM context not typically observed in the traditional WOM literature. If purchased goods fail to satisfy consumers, those repurposed reviews may backfire on their sales by creating a negative discrepancy that, in turn, induces experienced consumers to generate more negative reviews and other consumers to generate more detailed and objective reviews
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