The Usefulness Of Experiential Product Reviews

With the fast development of E-commerce and the population of Web2.0, more andmore consumers go shopping online. Product reviews may have more affects on potentialconsumers’ behavior. Considering valuable reviews buried in the mass comments, thestudy on the usefulness of product reviews not only has important theoretical value, butalso has a great practical value that can provide effective help to manufacturers, users.In this thesis, both the quality and reputation are studied. Firstly, with reference tothe current credibility evaluation in C2C e-commerce, we use both the quality andreputation to evaluate the usefulness of the product reviews and define the reputation.Secondly, we use the reference framework of Wang and Strong to build a framework forevaluate the quality of product reviews, and based on this framework, we sets out a seriesof indicators-average subjective score, the variance of subjective score, user ratings, thenumber of attributes dimensions evaluation, the number of words, etc. By using textcategorization method, we obtain the relevant indicators of value. And in order to explorethe impact of these indicators on the reputation of the product reviews, we use them as theindependent variables in our model based on assumption that they all impact thereputation. Finally, we use multiple regression analysis to study that how these indicatorsimpact the quality and the reputation of the reviews. The object of our research is anexperiential product—the hotel. We find that our research is very important on both thetheory and the management. Our research will play a great role in e-commerce, especiallyonline review sites, and is expected to help manufacturers and users to access to thosehigh-value reviews which reflect the experience of the corresponding product quickly.