Research On Perceived Usefulness Of Additional Reviews Under Different Product Involvement

Online shopping has penetrated into people's daily life.Online reviews are important reference factors for consumers in online shopping.Online reviews are becoming more and more popular,but consumers' trust in the content of the reviews and the adoption of commentaries have tended to go down.Many platforms set additional reviews to improve online evaluation systems,and consumers are indeed paying more and more attention to comments containing reviews in the process of shopping decisions.What factors affect consumers' perception of online reviews? Are there any factors that affect consumers' perceived differences in only initial reviews and reviews with additional contents?Scholars at home and abroad have found that consumers believe that the content of additional reviews is more useful than the initial reviews,but it has not yet explored the factors that affect perceived differences and it's boundary deeply.This paper explains the perceived difference between the consumer's perception of the first reviews and the additional reviews from the perspective of the quality of reviews' content through Attribution Theory.According to the Elaboration likelihood model,the product involvement will affect the user's information processing.The products under different degrees of involvement will affect the consumer's processing of the review information.Since the additional reviews are the supplement of the initial reviews,it is inferred that consumers own different perceived usefulness between the initial reviews and reviews with additional reviews while the product involvement is different level.Combining text analysis of real online reviews data and experimental research,this paper compares the differences between initial comments and additional reviews,then examines the psychological mechanism of consumers' perceived usefulness of reviews.Also,the moderating effect of product involvement in the relationship was tested.The results are as follows.Firstly,the quality of reviews content mediates the impact of whether the additional reviews exist or not on the perceived usefulness: compared with only the initial review exists,the review contains additional reviews are usually considered with highly quality of contents,which in turn increases consumers' perception of the usefulness of reviews.Secondly,the product involvement is positively regulated the relationship between additional reviews the type of reviews(only initial reviews vs.reviews with additional review)and consumers' perception of reviews' usefulness: compared with low involvement products,the presence of additional reviews has a greater impact on the usefulness of high involvement products.Finally,the mediating effect of reviews' quality was moderated by the product involvement: there is a positive correlation between the existed of additional review and the quality of reviews' content;compared with low-involvement products,when the product is high-involvement,whether the additional review exist or not and the quality of contents have stronger effect on the perceived usefulness of reviews.In theory,this research has enriched the existing research and broadened the research perspective of online reviews.In practice,it can guide online retailers to understand and use additional reviews to carry out effective marketing.