Does Topic Consistency Matter? A Study of Critic and User Reviews in the Movie Industry

Abstract

Online review platforms often present reviews from both critics and general users. In this research, the authors propose a measure named “topic consistency” to capture the degree of overlap between critic and user review content. High topic consistency suggests greater information recall due to repeated presentation of the same topics, which may increase the memorability of movie attributes and therefore positively affect movie demand. The authors measure the topic consistency between critic and user reviews using topic models and further study the financial consequences of this measure using data for movies released in the United States. Topic consistency is positively associated with subsequent box office revenue, suggesting a positive relationship between topic consistency and movie demand. Furthermore, the effect of topic consistency on demand is the greatest for movies with mediocre review ratings and when the review ratings from critics are close to those from users. Using lab experiments, the authors provide evidence of the causal link between topic consistency and consumers’ willingness to watch a movie, and support for the potential mediation through the information recall of reviews. Movie producers and advertisers should consider highlighting or inducing a central theme for critics and users to discuss, as the more review content between critics and users overlaps, the higher a movie’s revenue.

Crowdfunding performance, market performance, and the moderating roles of product innovativeness and experts' judgment: Evidence from the movie industry

“…Closely related to our work, one stream of literature has examined the interplay between user and expert reviews in the movie industry (Basuroy et al, 2020;Chakravarthy et al, 2010;Kim, Ding, et al, 2022a;Wang et al, 2015;Zhou & Duan, 2016). However, these studies have mostly focused on how the level of disagreement among users or experts and between users and experts shapes the effect of eWOM on movie performance.…”

Essays on the herding behavior in online reviews and its consequence

“…The topic similarity measures the topic consistency between the focal review and its prior review. We computed the cosine similarity (e.g., Han et al, 2012;Kim et al, 2023) between the topic vectors of a subsequent review i and a previous review j, 46J$K_M$7 NO , to reflect the similarity in terms of the contents discussed in these reviews. Therefore, the topic similarity can be represented as follows:…”

“…There are limited studies looking into the relationship between review topic similarity and review helpfulness. In our paper, we define topic similarity as equivalent to the topic consistency in the prior research, which is defined as the similarity between the topics covered by two messages (Kim et al 2023;Yang et al, 2021;Zhou et al 2022). For example, Kim et al (2023) employ topic consistency to measure the similarity between the topics of movie reviews from users and critics.…”