| With the fast improvement of web 2.0 and the advancement of social media,user-generated social media platforms make it possible for consumers to share a wealth of product information in the form of online reviews.Online reviews have a strong influence on consumers’ attitudes and purchase behaviors[1].Consumers can make their purchase decision by reading online reviews,and sellers can get customer feedback from online reviews.As a new kind of WOM(word of mouth),online reviews can help potential consumers to reduce product uncertainty and to provide purchasing decision information.Prior research has demonstrated that online reviews are considered more trustworthy than traditional sources.Consumers’ implied independence renders user-generated content(UGC)more credible than marketer-generated information[1,2].There are,however,also many challenges.Frist,online reviews are generated in unprecedented volume and at great speed in big data era.The massive online reviews have also brought problems such as information overload and the uneven quality of reviews,which makes consumers harder to find the helpful information when reading online reviews and the efficacy could be limited.Second,scholars have long called for more study on the effects of market differences on online review usefulness.For example,it worth studying whether online consumer reviewing behavior will yield different effects on review usefulness across cultures,and whether review usefulness shows difference in various public opinion environment.To address these important study issues,this paper first compares the different evaluation between different film markets,and then compares different types of movies and different countries on two websites.The results show that the evaluation of the film is more likely to get high evaluation on douban.com website,and the score of the good movie is easier to focus on a high-level district,therefore,we believe that it is related to the public opinion environment.In addition,we learned that for foreign films through comparative analysis,douban.com users are more likely to give a high evaluation,and IMDB users tend to speech freely,high and low scores are both exists.Our comparative analysis pave the way for our subsequent regression analysis.This paper draws on dual process theory to investigate how does market differences influence consumers’ behavior when writing and reading online reviews.To this end,we propose a conceptual model,which is based on dual process theory,the central route and the peripheral route are two major routes proposed in ELM theory.Central route refers to process information in a more comprehensive and thoughtful way,which leads to attitude change;peripheral route refers to the individual judge information through peripheral cues which are related to factors such as credibility and eventually change the attitude.Consumer path choice depends on the individual’s ability to process information.When individuals possess higher levels of ability,they are more likely to think carefully about the information contained in the important argument;on the contrary,when the individual is lack of corresponding ability are more likely to form the attitude by processing some edge information and cues.Thus,we explore the determinants of review usefulness from the perspective of content quality and source quality.We argue that consumers’ rating behaviors show differences in different movie markets,and they are affected by cultural influences and public opinion influences.We first premise that review content(review length and review extremity)have a positive effect on review usefulness.As for review length,According ELM theory,the information about the product is often incomplete for consumers when they make purchase decisions,they should search more information to reduce the uncertainty[4].However,seeking more information are often time-consuming and costly,so there is a trade-off to balance the costs and benefits.Former research shows that,under the premise of not increasing the corresponding search costs,consumers will prefer reviews which contains more information since information length can enhance the diagnostic power[5].Mudambi & Schuff(2010)believe that review length may promote carefully browsing,enhance or change the original attitude,and increase consumers’ confidence in order to promote the decision-making process[6].As for review extremity,E.Schlosser(2011)found that the moderate reviews are more vague and ambiguous than extreme reviews due to the stronger objectivity,and moderate reviews are considered to be the lack of useful information.Instead,extreme reviews could clearly demonstrate the reviewer’s subjective emotion tendency.In order to obtain the accurate information of commodity information,instead of moderate reviews,consumers prefer extreme reviews.We premise that review source(reviewer’s centrality and reviewer’s experience)have a positive effect on review usefulness.As for reviewer’s centrality,centrality is a key indicator to analyze the characteristics of nodes in the network,which is also an important indicator to measure the influence of the individual in the social network.Reviewer with high centrality may demonstrate that their reviews to be more credible.Prior research shows that there is a very strong positive correlation between centrality and trustworthiness.In the evaluation process of reviews usefulness,the reviewer’s network centrality has a positive effect on review usefulness.Reviewer who tends to have a high centrality will enjoy more trust,and thus the usefulness will be high.As for reviewer’s experience,Reviewer’s experience refers to how much Reviews have been published on the review websites.The reviews punished by different authors often have different influence on readers.Reviewers with more experience show that their reviews to be more credible.Review written by reviewer who has more review experience will have great impact on consumers’ decision making since these reviews published by reviewers with more experience can help reduce uncertainty of the product.Additionally,we premise that market difference(cultural type and public opinion)moderate the relationship between review characteristics and review usefulness.As for cultural type,in collectivist societies,individuals often have strong relationship with the group and they always focus on the extent to which opinions are accepted by expectations of the group.In other words,people in collectivist societies seek for harmony than conflict.We expect that individuals in a collectivist culture,such as China would like reviews with less expression of emotion in online reviews.On the contrary,we anticipate that members of an individualist culture,such as US,prefer freedom of expression.Longer reviews often contained more subjective information and free expression.Besides,since both reviewers and readers in collectivist culture would want to keep harmonious atmosphere,they would like reviews which is moderate.But reviewers in individualist culture value the expression of opinions much.We therefore expect Chinese to be less like extreme reviews than American consumers would be.As for public opinion,they not only consider the review content,but also take public opinions into consideration.The public opinion is composed of both positive and negative opinion.Previous studies found that the spread of negative opinions on the Internet is more convenient than positive opinions,thus we expect that when the public opinion entropy is low(negative opinion),consumer can get enough information for evaluating the review usefulness.However,when the public opinion entropy is high(positive opinion),the content review information is not enough for consumers,it makes consumers think deeply about reviews’ credibility by seeking other information of source quality,such as reviewer’s centrality and reviewer’s experience.Reviews are collected from IMDB.com and douban.com by Python 3,and we processed research data by statistical analysis software SPSS 20.0.The results demonstrate that they show significant differences across two different movie markets(China and US).Specifically,online reviews length,reviewer centrality and reviewer experience all have remarkable positive effects on reviews usefulness.We found that long sentences and the extreme emotion is more helpful and can be more persuasive in individualist societies(US)than collectivist societies(China);the effect of reviewer centrality and reviewer experience to review usefulness is more prevalent in positive public opinion.The findings give a better understanding of online reviewer behaviors across different markets and provide important insights into emerging movie markets such as China. |
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