Online store image: conceptual foundations and empirical measurement
Information and Management
EC '06 Proceedings of the 7th ACM conference on Electronic commerce
Journal of Management Information Systems
When Online Reviews Meet Hyperdifferentiation: A Study of the Craft Beer Industry
Journal of Management Information Systems
The future of advertising and the value of social network websites: some preliminary examinations
Proceedings of the ninth international conference on Electronic commerce
WSKS '08 Proceedings of the 1st world summit on The Knowledge Society: Emerging Technologies and Information Systems for the Knowledge Society
Electronic Commerce Research and Applications
An integrative approach to assess qualitative and quantitative consumer feedback
Electronic Commerce Research
Expert Systems with Applications: An International Journal
Information Systems Research
Consideration sets in online shopping environments: the effects of search tool and information load
Electronic Commerce Research and Applications
Revising the wordnet domains hierarchy: semantics, coverage and balancing
MLR '04 Proceedings of the Workshop on Multilingual Linguistic Ressources
Reporting incentives and biases in online review forums
ACM Transactions on the Web (TWEB)
Deriving the Pricing Power of Product Features by Mining Consumer Reviews
Management Science
IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering
A study of manipulative and authentic negative reviews
Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Ubiquitous Information Management and Communication
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Online reviews have received much attention recently in the literature, as their visibility has been proven to play an important role during the purchase process. Furthermore, recent theoretical insight argue that the votes casted on how helpful an online review is (review helpfulness) are of particular importance, since they constitute a focal point for examining consumer decision making during the purchase process. In this paper, we explore the interplay between online review helpfulness, rating score and the qualitative characteristics of the review text as measured by readability tests. We construct a theoretical model based on three elements: conformity, understandability and expressiveness and we investigate the directional relationship between the qualitative characteristics of the review text, review helpfulness and the impact of review helpfulness on the review score. Furthermore, we examine whether this relation holds for extreme and moderate review scores. To validate this model we applied four basic readability measures to a dataset containing 37,221 reviews collected from Amazon UK, in order to determine the relationship between the percentage of helpful votes awarded to a review and the review text's stylistic elements. We also investigated the interrelationships between extremely helpful and unhelpful reviews, as well as absolutely positive and negative reviews using intergroup comparisons. We found that review readability had a greater effect on the helpfulness ratio of a review than its length; in addition, extremely helpful reviews received a higher score than those considered less helpful. The present study contributes to the ever growing literature on on-line reviews by showing that readability tests demonstrate a directional relationship with average length reviews and their helpfulness and that this relationship holds both for moderate and extreme review scores.