Customer Participation Motivation And The Helpfulness Of Online Review

With the rapid development of information technology, world economy and society, e-commerce has gradually become an important retailing pattern, online shopping has also become a major way of shopping. One of the main differences between e-commerce and online shopping and that of the entity store is that commodity can reach the terminal customer only through the ways that can be rendered by the internet (such as text, voice, image and so on), as a result, visual perception and trial is limited. As a network extending form of word-of-mouth, online review can effectively compensate for these shortcomings. For vendors of e-commerce, online review helps them to achieve the purpose of network marketing, establishment of a reputation system and spread of reputation. For customers, it contributes to their decision making, reducing the uncertainty and risk of online shopping. Vendor wants to obtain more effective online reviews, and consumers would like to see more effective reviews to help their purchasing decisions. Therefore, it is of important practical significance to study the origin and influence factors of online customer reviews.Based on the diffusion theory and Hovland communication and persuasion theory, this paper studied the motivation for customers to participate in online reviews and factors influencing the helpfulness of customer review, standing in the neutral position. Thesis took5710online customer reviews of Chinese B2C electronic commerce websites as our object of study, and studied "who, what to say and helpfulness", and aim to resolved the problems of "insufficient information" and "information overload" in the online shopping era. The main works of our research are as follows:First, compared the similarities and differences between online reviews and traditional word-of-mouth, and got the characteristics of online reviews of Chinese B2C e-commerce website. Thesis built the theoretical analysis framework of online reviews, which including reviewer, contents of the review, receivers and the e-commerce website, based on the "5W Mode" of who, says what, in which channel, to whom, and with what effect.Second, analyzed the motivations of knowledge sharing, participation in virtual community and word-of-mouth diffusion, and summed up with nine participation motivations of online reviewers, from three dimensions of self-directed, community oriented, and business oriented. Thesis discovered the "reciprocity" motivation while verifying the above mentioned motivation, with one-to-one in-depth interview. Then, Thesis analyzed the mutual reciprocal psychology and behavior characteristics when customers publish reviews, with sequential reciprocity game model.Third, based on the theories of communication, psychology, behavior and information science, thesis proposed the four dimensions that affect the helpfulness of customers’reviews, which are information content, information sources, product type and other dimension, from the attribute theory, elaboration likelihood model, cognitive fit theory, information assessibility and diagnosticity theory, with the text mining methods of part-of-speech tagging and word frequency statistics. Established the model of influence factors of the validity of online customer reviews, and validate the model with empirical data of5710reviews of Chinese large B2C websites. According to the conclusions, Thesis provided some measures for e-commerce sites and customers to improve online review system.The main research conclusion and innovations are as follows:First, for the shortage of unilateral and static research of participation motivation, thesis discovered the customers’"reciprocity" motivation to publish reviews through interview. Then using sequential game theory analyzed "customer and customer" mutual reciprocity motivation and dynamic mechanism. Found that information sharing, reciprocity propensity and mutual trust play an important role. Those foundations make up the theoretical perspectives of participation motivation that only from experiment and empirical analysis. Thesis found that customer participate in the online reviews not only for "egoism" or "altruism", they also show "mutual reciprocity" tendency. Thesis extended the prisoner’s dilemma model that analyze the online reviews from the angle of long-term, dynamic and mutual reciprocal psychological, and found that when individuals have stronger reciprocity motivations, and trust others, they would more likely to publish reviews. Second, for the shortage of analysis of reviews’text content, using data mining technology objectively thesis extracted the key attributes of online reviews include tone intensity, representations of objectivity, and information integrity. Thesis built a comprehensive model that measures the helpfulness of reviews, based on information content, sources of information, product type and the others. Using text miming and content analysis methodology thesis provided a more reliable basis for the establishment of a more reasonable model, and refining the factors affect the helpfulness of online review. The reviews’helpfulness model improves the relative theories that analyze the helpfulness of reviews. The empirical data are from online e-commerce websites in China, and using the objective data from their websites, these can greatly avoid the error that questionnaire may cause.Third, thesis found that there is an inverted U shape relationship among the depth and emotion of reviewers for the first time. Based on the empirical analysis of reviews contents, thesis integrated and explained the previous inconsistent findings and conflicts. Thesis found positive correlation between tone intensity, objectivity of reviews with the helpfulness of reviews, but negative correlation between information integrity with reviews’helpfulness.Fourth, for the shortage of only considering the information content, through empirical analysis, thesis firstly found and examined the correlation between sources of information and online reviews’helpfulness. Product type really played a partial moderating role in some of the above mentioned relationships.