The Effect Of The Human-Face Emoji Meaning On Online Review Helpfulness Perception In E-Commerce Context

Online reviews are important reference cues for consumers to make shopping decisions.As nonverbal cues,emojis help senders to express their emotions and help recipients to understand textual messages.This paper mainly focuses on the effect of human-face emoji meaning on review helpfulness,and explores its underlying mechanism and boundary conditions behind this effect.On the basis of the relevant literature of emoji,this paper classifies the meaning of human-face emoji into two dimensions: multiple meaning and less meaning.This paper proposes that emoji with less meaning in reviews will be perceived more useful than emoji with multiple meaning.Uncertainty plays the mediating role between human-face emoji meaning and review helpfulness.User type,review extremity and review characteristic moderate the effect of human-face emoji meaning on review helpfulness.In order to examine the effect of human-face emoji meaning on review helpfulness,this paper conducted four behavioral experiments.Results showed that the meaning of humanface emoji significantly influenced review helpfulness perception.Specifically,neutral word reviews with less meaning face emoji were perceived more helpful than neutral reviews with multiple meaning face emoji.Uncertainty mediated the effect of face emoji meaning on reviews helpfulness.The moderating effect of user type was not significant.Heavy emoji users and light emoji users both believed that reviews with less meaning face emoji were more helpful.As regards to extreme word reviews,the effect of emoji meaning on review helpfulness was not significant;while regarding moderate word reviews,less meaning face emoji significantly enhanced review helpfulness perception.In addition,for concrete word reviews,the effect of emoji meaning on review helpfulness was not significant;while for abstract word reviews,less meaning face emoji led to more review helpfulness perception.