Research On Interaction Effect Of Product Type And Online Review Valence On Online Review Usefulness

Popularity of the Internet promotes the rapid development of electronic commerce. Online shopping has become a popular mode of consumption. In order to meet the credit needs of online shopping, major e-commerce sites have established similar credit systems. Online reviews of consumers are the important part of these credit systems. According to the valence of online reviews(rating good or bad), online reviews can be divided into positive and negative reviews. Current researches obtained inconsistent conclusions about the influence of online review valence. That different types of goods are chosen in these studies is an important factor which may lead to this contradiction. Therefore, to clarify the moderating effect of product type on the influence of online review valence becomes an interesting research question.This paper carried out a detailed review of some theories(for example prospect theory, attribution theory and consistency theory) which may be related to the interaction effect of product type and online reivew valence on the influence of online review. Through the review of relevant theory, this study identified the classification of goods uesd in research and proposed hypotheses about the detailed form of the interaction effect of product type and online reivew valence on online review usefulness(a concrete manifestation of the influence of online reviews). In order to carry out specific empirical research, this paper built a mathematical model on the interaction effect of product type and online reivew valence to support data analysis.This article selected online reviews of www.amazon.com as a research data base and crawled required online reviews according to needs. This paper combined the mathematical model and specific online reviews and got following conclusions: (1) For both search goods and experience goods, the usefulness of positive reviews is greater than that of negative reviews. (2) For search goods, the usefulness of positive reviews is greater than for experience goods. (3) For search goods, the usefulness of negative reviews is greater than for experience goods. (4) The difference of usefulness between negative reviews and positive reviews is greater for experience goods than for search goods. These conclusions will help major e-commerce sites build online review systems and improve recommendation systems.