The importance of being earnest: Mandatory vs. voluntary disclosure of incentives for online product reviews

Cui, Geng; Chung, Yuho; Peng, Ling; Zheng, Wanyi

doi:10.1016/j.jbusres.2021.11.068

Cited by 6 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 41 publications

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“…Furthermore, in accordance with the social exchange theory (SET), incentives may motivate social behavior by considering the satisfaction of individual needs, such as encouraging customers to write online reviews [9]. Disclosing incentives maintains trust, reduces bias, boosts helpfulness and increases sales [10]. The disclosure of intrinsic communication motives for writing product reviews is more authentic and less betraying [33].…”

Section: Incentive Vs Organicmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Moreover, according to loss aversion theory, review valence is more influential than review usefulness in the decision-making process [38]; therefore, incentive reviews impact purchase decision-making as they increase valence [9] by increasing emotional words in customers' WOMs [5,6]. Disclosing incentives is crucial to prevent accuracy decrease and new consumer decision misguidance [10].…”

Section: Incentive and Purchase Decision-makingmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Extensive quantitative methods alongside the mixed-method experimental studies were used to evaluate review valence's impact on decision-making [38]. Regression models commonly used to assess reviews' impact on decision-making [35], that often incorporating methods like sentiment analysis [10]. A multi-methodological research design of two randomized experiments was utilized to test incentives' impact on reviews volume and length, and the potential bias in purchase decision-making [4].…”

Section: Approaches Of Identifying and Analyzing Incentive Reviewsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Another categorization is based on reviews' writing criteria such as experience and monetary rewards denotes reviews as organic (no incentive or non-incentivized), incentive, or fake. Despite organic/non-incentivized reviews [2][3][4] that are based on real experiences and free from external motivation or incentives, some individuals may be tempted with rewards to write either incentivized reviews reflecting their actual product purchases experience [2,3,[5][6][7][8][9] or fake reviews [7,10,11] lacking experiential foundation.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 3 more Smart Citations

Empowering Consumer Decision: Decoding Incentive vs. Organic Reviews for Smarter Choices Through Advanced Textual Analysis

Kargozari,

Ding,

Chen

2024

Preprint

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In recent years, online review system attracts attention to assess seller-customer relations in the world of e-commerce. To address the quality concern of online review, especially incentivized ones, this study evaluates credibility and consistency based on reviews’ volume, length, and content to distinguish the impact of incentives on customer review behavior, improving review quality, and purchase decision-making. Software product reviews collected from software review websites, including Capterra, Software Advice, and GetApp undergo Exploratory Data Analysis (EDA) to reveal critical features such as cost, support, usability, and product features. The indirect impact of companies’ size, direct impact of users’ experience, and different impacts of changing situations during years on the incentive reviews’ volume are major findings of sentiment analysis. A/B testing results show a minimal to no impact of such reviews on purchasing decisions, highlighting discrepancies in credibility and consistency in volume, length, and content. Employing advanced techniques like Sentence-BERT (SBERT) and TF-IDF, the study explores semantic differences in reviews to improve recommendation systems for a more customized shopping experience. This approach seeks to establish a framework that discerns between review types and their effect on customer behavior. The findings contribute to developing more sophisticated and consistent e-commerce solutions, emphasizing the importance of authentic and reliable online reviews in influencing consumer choices.

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Section: Incentive Vs Organicmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Incentive and Purchase Decision-makingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Approaches Of Identifying and Analyzing Incentive Reviewsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

Empowering Consumer Decision: Decoding Incentive vs. Organic Reviews for Smarter Choices Through Advanced Textual Analysis

Kargozari,

Ding,

Chen

2024

Preprint

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“…The mean similarity value of all organic reviews in index_inc) with the similar process above. (7,8) Similarity *+, " = ∑ 𝑖𝑛𝑑𝑒𝑥_𝑖𝑛𝑐(𝑟𝑒𝑣𝑖𝑒𝑤 *+, " ) 𝑀 𝑗 = 0,1,2. . 𝑀 − 1 (7)…”

Section: Step1mentioning

confidence: 99%

A Quantitative Study of Software Reviews Using Content Analysis Methods

Zhang

Yang²,

Peng³

et al. 2022

IEEE Access

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Online product reviews play a critical role for consumers to make decision of product purchasing, and become an important data source for vendors to build a recommendation system. Some consumers even won't buy a product without reading online reviews first, and some vendors invite reviewers to write product reviews before a product is released to the market. However, review quality could great impact the useless of the reviews for supporting the purchasing decision and recommendation. In order to produce enough high-quality reviews, it is a normal practice that vendors provide incentives for writing product reviews. Some research work showed the incentive reviews could be more bias comparing to organic reviews, but other work showed incentive reviews contain more useful information. However, some other research work showed very different results regarding the differences between the incentivized reviews and organic reviews. One of the reasons explaining the observation differences could be due to the quality of the reviewers and the reviews. Therefore, it is necessary to control the quality of the reviewers and the reviews to more objectively comparing the two types of reviews. In this research, we first discuss an approach for ensuring the quality of the data collection and processing to ensure the quality of the comparison study. Then we explore the differences between incentivized reviews and organic reviews collected from a website that provides reviews for enterprise software systems. Several parameters of the reviews such as overall score and sentiment and subjectivity of the reviews were analyzed and compared. The research result could provide a reference for appropriately using the reviews and managing the reviewing process.

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Suspicion of online product reviews as fake: Cues and consequences

Harrison‐Walker

Jiang

2023

Journal of Business Research

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The importance of being earnest: Mandatory vs. voluntary disclosure of incentives for online product reviews

Cited by 6 publications

References 41 publications

Empowering Consumer Decision: Decoding Incentive vs. Organic Reviews for Smarter Choices Through Advanced Textual Analysis

Empowering Consumer Decision: Decoding Incentive vs. Organic Reviews for Smarter Choices Through Advanced Textual Analysis

A Quantitative Study of Software Reviews Using Content Analysis Methods

Suspicion of online product reviews as fake: Cues and consequences

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