Are Review Helpfulness Score and Review Unhelpfulness Score Two Sides of The Same Coin or Different Coins?

Abstract

Online review platforms have increasingly incorporated the review evaluating system (i.e., a system that allows users to evaluate whether reviews are helpful/unhelpful) to assist review readers and encourage review contributors. However, although we have extensive knowledge about the review helpfulness score, our insights regarding its counterpart, the review unhelpfulness score, are lacking. Addressing this limitation is important because many researchers have adopted the review unhelpfulness score assuming that it is driven by intrinsic review characteristics while practitioners also implicitly assume that the unhelpfulness score can identify low-quality reviews. The primary objective of this work is to verify whether the review unhelpfulness score is influenced by intrinsic review characteristics that drive review helpfulness score. We find that unlike review helpfulness score, unhelpfulness score is not driven by intrinsic review characteristics, and that helpfulness voters behave significantly different than unhelpfulness voters. Further implications and future directions are also discussed.