Online Commentary On Usefulness Empirical Research

Online consumer review has become one of the important information for consumers when they shopping online. And at a great extent it determines the consumer’s shopping desire. Researches in the field of marketing show that, the spread of online consumer reviews plays an important role in reducing the uncertainty of the consumer’s purchase, and helping consumers to make an effective purchase decisions. With the surge in the number of the online review, how to get valuable information from a large number of useless information become a new problem that people face with when they shopping online. In face of thousands of consumer reviews, which of them provides the most valuable information for consumers to make their purchase decisions? How to obtain valuable information from those consumer reviews? To online sellers, how to help consumers to find the information they needed, and shorten the time the consumers spend on making their purchase decisions? Ultimately, to discuss the factors that affect the helpfulness of online customer reviews and the mechanism between them will provide help for the solution of the above problems.Many scholars, at home or abroad, have done some study about this problem, and found a series of factors that influence the helpfulness of online consumer review. And some other scholars have done some further study about the information processing mechanism of online consumer review. However, most of these studies are based on the research of tangible goods’ online reviews; studies about the service are still very few. At the same time, the existing research results have some controversies on some conclusions, especially on the terms of function mechanism. The theoretical framework of online consumer review helpfulness is still not perfect, the research framework is still not mature, and the solution is still not clear.Therefore, in this thesis, from the perspective of cognitive theory, we will utilize the ELM(elaboration likelihood model) analytical framework to empirically analyze the online consumer review data from Dianping.com, reveal the factors that influence the helpfulness of online consumer review, and further discuss the mechanism between them.The result found that, both of the dominant factor and the recessive factor of the reviews may influence the helpfulness of online consumer review. And showed inverted u-shaped relationship between the review depth of the recessive factors and the perceived usefulness of the review. Moreover, service involvement positively adjust the relationship between the recessive factors and the helpfulness of online consumer review. But the regulating effect on the relationship between the dominant factors and the helpfulness of online consumer review is not obvious. And, service type positively adjust the relationship between all the factors(except the review valence) and the helpfulness of online consumer review.