Ascertaining the significance of reviews: In view of temporal pattern and assigning weights to reviews

Abstract

Online user reviews have become an important source of information to consumers about the quality of various products. With the high volume of reviews that are typically published for a single product makes harder for individuals to locate the best reviews and understand the true underlying quality of a product. In this paper, we re-examine the impact of reviews on economic outcomes like product sales and see how different factors like subjectivity, readability, spelling errors, temporal pattern of online reviews, textual characteristics of online reviews in different time periods affect social outcomes like the extent of their perceived usefulness. Our elementary econometric analysis using two stage regression reveals that the extent of subjectivity, in formativeness, readability, and linguistic correctness in reviews matters in influencing sales and perceived usefulness. By using component weight assignment algorithm along with SVM classifier we can accurately predict the impact of reviews on sales and their perceived usefulness.