Evaluating right versus just evaluating online consumer reviews

• Online review valence alone does not affect review usefulness and intentions.
• Consumers high in assessment evaluate negative reviews as being more useful.
• Consumers high in locomotion tend to evaluate positive reviews as being more useful.
• Negative reviews have an indirect positive effect on intention.
• This indirect effect is mediated by usefulness for consumers high in assessment.

Three competing arguments about the effect of word-of-mouth—positivity effect, negativity effect, and no effect—have been advanced in the literature and found inconsistent results. Previous studies have investigated various boundary conditions in an attempt to explain the inconsistent results concerning the effectiveness of recommendation valence. This study argues that the effectiveness of recommendation valence is not determined by recommendations’ content (i.e., positive vs. negative) but by consumers’ regulatory mode orientation, which has rarely been studied. An experiment on 168 participants shows that consumers high in assessment orientation evaluate negative reviews as being more useful, whereas consumers high in locomotion orientation tend to evaluate positive reviews as being more useful. Moreover, mediated moderation tests using bootstrapping demonstrate that, for consumers high in assessment orientation, negative reviews have an indirect positive effect on intention, mediated by message usefulness; however, this mediated moderation effect does not occur for consumers high in locomotion orientation. The study’s theoretical and practical implications, its limitations, and directions for future research are discussed in the conclusion.