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The reviews submitted by users are the foundation of user-generated content (UGC) platforms. However, the rapid growth of users brings the problems of information overload and spotty content, which makes it necessary for UGC platforms to screen out reviews that are really helpful to users. The authors put forward in this paper the factors influencing review helpfulness voting from the perspective of review characteristics and reviewer characteristics.

This study uses 8,953 reviews from 20 movies listed on Douban.com with variables focusing on review characteristics and reviewer characteristics that affect review helpfulness. To verify the six hypotheses proposed in the study, Stata 14 was used to perform tobit regression.

Findings show that review helpfulness is significantly influenced by the length, valence, timeliness and deviation rating of the reviews. The results also underlie that a review submitted by a reviewer who has more followers and experience is more affected by review characteristics.

Previous literature has discussed the factors that affect the helpfulness of reviews; however, the authors have established a new model that explores more comprehensive review characteristics and the moderating effect reviewer characteristics have on helpfulness. In this empirical research, the authors selected a UGC community in China as the research object. The UGC community may encourage users to write more helpful reviews by highlighting the characteristics of users. Users in return can use this to establish his/her image in the community. Future research can explore more variables related to users.

The peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/OIR-05-2020-0186.

This study aims to explore the relationship between the content characteristics of destination online reviews and travel intention under three individual circumstances: temporal distance, social distance and experiential distance.

Based on construal-level theory (CLT), this study divides online travel reviews into concrete and abstract reviews. Three experiments were conducted to test the moderating effects of temporal distance, social distance and experiential distance on the influence of review content characteristics on tourists' travel intentions.

The results show that abstract reviews would lead to higher travel intentions than concrete reviews. Furthermore, tourists' travel intentions differed depending on social distance and were significantly affected by reviews posted by reviewers similar to review recipients. In addition, the study contributes by discovering that the moderating effects of temporal distance, social distance and experiential distance were not significant, which differs from most of the previous research conclusions.

This study focused on review content characteristics, which provided a novel perspective for constructing online travel reviews. Furthermore, this research defined the concept of experiential distance in the context of online travel and expanded the research on psychological distance.

The authors investigated the effects of the characteristics of reviews, reviewers and corporate factors on review helpfulness and assessed the role of culture in moderating these relationships.

A research model was established based on the elaboration likelihood and information adoption models. To empirically analyze this research model, 10,611 TripAdvisor reviews from 9 countries were collected. In addition, a zero-inflated negative binomial model and multilevel analysis were employed in consideration of the data characteristics.

The results revealed that review depth had a positive effect on review helpfulness, and review ratings and reviewer expertise had a negative effect. As a corporate characteristic, hotel size had a negative effect on review helpfulness. In addition, the effects of review rating, reviewer expertise and hotel rating exhibited significant differences based on the moderating effects of uncertainty avoidance and power distance level.

The results of this study expand the review helpfulness literature by explaining the inconsistent findings of previous studies via cultural theory. In addition, past research in this field has mainly focused on analyzing only review and reviewer characteristics, while this study demonstrated that company size negatively affects review helpfulness based on the signaling theory. Finally, this study contributes to cultural comparison literature by discovering that the processing of review information by consumers differs according to their cultural background.

Consumer-perceived review attitude determines consumer overall information adoption and is a core part of consumer’s online-shopping. This study aims to focus on factors that could influence consumer review attitude and can be used by marketers to shape individual information perception.

The study used the questionnaire method to collect data from online shoppers and the modelling of structural equations as an empirical approach to analyse the data.

The findings demonstrate that both systematic and heuristic cues impact the reviewer’s credibility and perceived website attitude differently, which, in turn, influence review attitude. Review characteristics, such as factuality, consistency and relevancy, have a positive relationship with reviewer credibility, while only review consistency and relevancy appears to have a relationship with review attitude. Website characteristics such as reputation, familiarity and social interactivity positively influence the website attitude, which positively influences review attitude. Apart from this, review skepticism has a significant negative relationship with review attitude.

This study could help to foster a positive attitude towards online reviews. Digital marketers need to motivate trusted reviewers to post consistent, fact-based reviews. Further improving the overall website reputation and interactivity could bring a positive attitude towards the reviews. Also, digital marketers must filter and avoid contradictory reviews or reviews that have a bipolar message and reviews expressing numerous emotions to enhance review relevance and consistency.

The current study addresses the need to understand the formation of consumer review attitude through both review and website characteristics using heuristic – systematic model. The paper captures the complex process undergone by the consumer to decipher review attitude and thereby extend the understanding of consumer information processing.

Building on a small body of work, the authors' study aims to investigate some important antecedents of online review characteristics in the Chinese restaurant industry.

Using a data set of restaurant reviews collected from a most popular review platform in China, the authors conduct a series of analyses to examine the influence of travel experience and travel distance on travelers' review characteristics in terms of review rating and media richness. The moderating effect of restaurant price on the influence is also investigated.

Travelers with a longer travel distance and more travel experience tend to provide higher and lower online ratings, respectively, which can be explained by the construal level theory (CLT) and the expectation-confirmation theory (ECT), respectively. Furthermore, these strong feelings can then induce travelers to post enriched reviews with more pictures, more words and more affective words to release consumption tension. Besides, restaurant price can moderate these relationships.

Distinguished from most studies which mainly focus on the consequences of online review characteristics or antecedents of review helpfulness, the authors pay attention to the effects of travelers' individual differences in terms of travel distance and travel experience on travelers' online reviewing behavior. In addition to review rating, the authors also focus on media richness in terms of visual and textual information. The authors' research findings can benefit restaurant consumers and managers for their online word-of-mouth utilization and management.

The purpose of this paper is to suggest important determinants for helpfulness from the reviews’ product data, review characteristics, and textual characteristics, and identify the more crucial factors among these determinants by using statistical methods. Furthermore, this study intends to propose a classification-based review recommender using a decision tree (CRDT) that uses a decision tree to identify and recommend reviews that have a high level of helpfulness.

This study used publicly available data from Amazon.com to construct measures of determinants and helpfulness. To examine this, the authors collected data about economic transactions on Amazon.com and analyzed the associated review system. The final sample included 10,000 reviews composed of 4,799 helpful and 5,201 not helpful reviews.

The study selected more crucial determinants from a comprehensive group of product, reviewer, and textual characteristics through using a t-test and logistics regression. The five important variables found to be significant in both t-test and logistic regression analysis were the total number of reviews for the product, the reviewer’s history macro, the reviewer’s rank, the disclosure of the reviewer’s name, and the length of the review in words. The decision tree method produced decision rules for determining helpfulness from the value of the product data, review characteristics, and textual characteristics. The prediction accuracy of CRDT was better than that of the k-nearest neighbor (kNN) method and linear multivariate discriminant analysis in terms of prediction error. CRDT can suggest better determinants that have a greater effect on the degree of helpfulness.

The important factors suggested as affecting review helpfulness should be considered in the design of websites, as online retail sites with more helpful reviews can provide a greater potential value to customers. The results of the study suggest managers and marketers better understand customers’ review and increase the value to customers by proving enhanced diagnosticity to consumers.

This study is different from previous studies in that it investigated the holistic aspect of determinants, that is, product, review, and textual characteristics for classifying helpful reviews, and selected more crucial determinants from a comprehensive group of product, reviewer, and textual characteristics by using a t-test and logistics regression. This study utilized a decision tree, which has rarely been used in predicting review helpfulness, to provide rules for identifying helpful online reviews.

The purpose of this study is to investigate how book group recommendations can be used as a meaningful way to suggest suitable books to users, given the increasing number of individuals engaging in sharing and discussing books on the web.

The authors propose reviews fine-grained classification (CFGC) and its related models such as CFGC1 for book group recommendation. These models can categorize reviews successively by function and role. Constructing the BERT-BiLSTM model to classify the reviews by function. The frequency characteristics of the reviews are mined by word frequency analysis, and the relationship between reviews and total book score is mined by correlation analysis. Then, the reviews are classified into three roles: celebrity, general and passerby. Finally, the authors can form user groups, mine group features and combine group features with book fine-grained ratings to make book group recommendations.

Overall, the best recommendations are made by Synopsis comments, with the accuracy, recall, F-value and Hellinger distance of 52.9%, 60.0%, 56.3% and 0.163, respectively. The F1 index of the recommendations based on the author and the writing comments is improved by 2.5% and 0.4%, respectively, compared to the Synopsis comments.

Previous studies on book recommendation often recommend relevant books for users by mining the similarity between books, so the set of book recommendations recommended to users, especially to groups, always focuses on the few types. The proposed method can effectively ensure the diversity of recommendations by mining users’ tendency to different review attributes of books and recommending books for the groups. In addition, this study also investigates which types of reviews should be used to make book recommendations when targeting groups with specific tendencies.

This paper aims to examine the impact of selected characteristics (rating, volume and variability) of online user-generated reviews on the bottom-line profitability of restaurants.

Restaurant-level review data are extracted from TripAdvisor and matched with firm-level data from the financial reports gathered from the Belfirst database of Bureau van Dijk. The resulting sample contains data on 2,297 Belgian firms over the period 2007–2018, for which 134,831 reviews are investigated. The author’s regression model of firm-level profitability is estimated against online review characteristics and various financial control variables, including past profitability. This research model and estimation technique address the endogeneity concerns that typically weaken this kind of study.

While comparable studies on hotels document a positive association between review characteristics and profitability, the authors find no relationship between review rating, volume and variability in the profitability of restaurants.

Due to the format of the financial reports of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), data on turnover and cost of materials/services was not available for most restaurants in the sample, limiting our potential for analysis. In addition, our assessment of electronic word of mouth (eWOM) was limited to measures derived from user-generated reviews on TripAdvisor.

In the literature on eWOM, the importance of online reputation is hardly disputed, especially in the context of the hospitality sector. However, most research to date has focused on the hotel sector and top-line measures of success. This study uses restaurant-level financial data, focuses on bottom-line profitability, considers potential endogeneity issues and pays careful attention to the estimation technique. The results fail to establish a direct relationship between eWOM metrics and financial performance and are surprising, meriting further investigation to establish the underlying causes.

In contrast to prior studies on the impact of eWOM on restaurant performance at a group level, this study examines the impact on unit-level profitability, taking into account several potential sources of estimation bias. In addition, the authors challenge this finding with a battery of sensitivity tests, revalidating the absence of a relationship in each case.

The purpose of this study is to present a methodology for enhancing the quality and usefulness of online reviews for prospective customers to investigate how this contemporary form of instrumental support can be facilitated to strengthen customer-to-customer support.

This study develops an analytics framework with applications of machine learning models using customer review data from Amazon.com. Linear regression is commonly used for review helpfulness and sales prediction. In this study, Random Forest model is applied because of its strong performance and reliability. To advance the methodology, a custom script in Python is created to generate Partial Dependence Plots for intensive exploration of the dependency interpretations of review helpfulness and sales. The authors also apply K-Means to cluster reviewers and use the results to generate reviewer qualification scores and collective reviewer scores, which are incorporated into the review facilitation process.

The authors find the average helpfulness ratio of the reviewer as the most important determinant of reviewer qualification. The collective reviewer qualification for a product created based on reviewers’ characteristics is found important to customers’ purchase intentions and can be used as a metric for product comparison.

The findings of this study suggest that service improvement efforts can be performed by developing software applications to monitor reviewer qualifications dynamically, bestowing a badge to top quality reviewers, redesigning review sorting interfaces and displaying the consumer rating distribution on the product page, resulting in improved information reliability and consumer trust.

This study adds to the research on customer-to-customer support in the service literature. As customer reviews perform as a contemporary form of instrumental support, the authors validate the determinants of review helpfulness and perform an intensive exploration of its dependency interpretation. Reviewer qualification and the collective reviewer qualification scores are generated as new predictors and incorporated into the helpfulness-based review facilitation services.

Online reviews in online health communities (OHCs) have been a vital information source for patients. The extant literature on the bias effects of helpful reviews mainly concentrates on traditional e-commerce, whereas research on OHCs is still rare. Thus, based on the heuristic-systematic model (HSM), this research explores how two unique reviewer characteristics in OHCs, which may induce attribution bias and confirmation bias, affect review helpfulness and how review length moderates these relationships.

This research analyzed 130,279 reviews collected from haodf.com (one of the representative OHCs in China) by adopting the negative binomial regression to test our research model.

The results indicate that reviewer cured status positively influences review helpfulness, whereas reviewer recommendation source negatively affects review helpfulness. Moreover, the effects of the two reviewer cues on review helpfulness will be weaker for longer reviews.

First, as one of the initial attempts, the current study investigates the effects of confirmation bias and attribution bias of online reviews in OHCs by exploring the effects of two unique reviewer characteristics on review helpfulness. Second, the weakening moderating effects of review length on the two bias effects provide empirical support for the theoretical arguments of the HSM in OHCs.