Review popularity and review helpfulness: A model for user review effectiveness

The wide adoption and perceived helpfulness of online user reviews on consumers' decision making have energized academic research on the assessment of review effectiveness. Although the literature probed the impacts of user reviews on various elements of review effectiveness independently, little research has done to examine them jointly. Inspired by communication theories, we conceptualize a framework for user review effectiveness in which we focus on the joint assessment of its first two elements: Review Popularity and Review Helpfulness. We develop our hypotheses regarding the effects of the user review determinants on both Review Popularity and Review Helpfulness, and further develop an operational model to empirically test our hypotheses using data collected from Amazon. Our study suggests that disentangling Review Popularity and Review Helpfulness in assessing review effectiveness is not only conceptually sounding, but also managerially beneficial. We find that Review Popularity is as important as Review Helpfulness in review effectiveness evaluations. Review determinants may play opposite roles on Review Popularity and Review Helpfulness (e.g., valence), and can drive review effectiveness via Review Popularity or Review Helpfulness or both. These findings offer new insights for various decision makers to harvest user review effectiveness in online markets.