Understanding the role of argument quality in the adoption of online reviews

Abstract

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to develop a research model that examines the effect of argument quality and argument perspective on the adoption of online reviews in a value-based decision model. In addition, the paper investigates the moderating effects of argument quality from needs theory. Design/methodology/approach – To validate the research model, a questionnaire survey was conducted in the Chinese online shopping context. Hypotheses were tested using partial least squares analysis on a data set of 208 online consumers. Findings – The results suggest that argument quality and argument perspective have positive impacts on perceived value, further influencing the adoption of online reviews. Moreover, the results confirm that the information credibility and quantity sufficiency of online reviews are positively associated with argument quality. The findings also indicate that argument quality mediates the relationship between argument perspective and perceived value. Originality/value – This work contributes to the literature by employing a value-based decision model to study the adoption of online reviews in the online shopping context, as well as the moderating effect of argument quality on the argument perspective to perceived value. The main conclusions of this study can be valuable to online marketing managers.

Online Information Review Research and Its Future Direction: A Literature Review

“…Consumer reference has been established as another important process in information review. The studies can be categorized into positive and negative reviews (Fu et al, 2015;Xu, 2018), recommender systems (Kim et al, 2009;Baum and Spann, 2014;Xu and Yao, 2015;Luan et al, 2018) and friend vis-a-vis the crowd (Lee and Ma, 2012;Pan et al, 2018). Lee and Ma, (2012) averred that information gained through online reviews is useful in reducing uncertainty associated with online shopping.…”

“…Providing online consumer reviews does not always benefit an online retailer, as inconsistent recommendations do negatively influence consumers' purchase decisions (Baum and Spann, 2014). Information credibility and quantity does influence the consumer product-review interest (Xu and Yao, 2015;Luan et al, 2018).…”

“…The extant literature has recently been finding solutions to some notable challenges faced by managers of online reviews namely: (i) usefulness of online reviews (Liu and Park, 2015;Marinkovic and Kalinic, 2017;Sebastianelli and Tamimi, 2018;Zhang and Lin, 2018), (ii) quality and reliability of consumer reviews as against the increasing quantities (Yagci and Das, 2018;Yang and Chao, 2018;Chakraborty, 2019), (iii) review-based ranking of reviews (Chen et al, 2017;Saumya et al, 2018;Lee et al, 2019), (iv) user recommendation (Xu and Yao, 2015;Luan et al, 2018) and (v) the valence or effectiveness of the reviews (Baker and Kim, 2019;Song et al, 2020;Hong et al, 2020). Varied research methodologies have been applied in these studies such as statistical experiments (Kwok and Xie, 2016;Zhang and Lin, 2018), evaluation and categorization of online reviews (Chen, 2016), surveys (Lee et al, 2017;Liu et al, 2018), modeling (Pan et al, 2018) and designed theoretical frameworks (Banerjee and Chua, 2014).…”

Towards Sustainable Development of Online Communities in the Big Data Era: A Study of the Causes and Possible Consequence of Voting on User Reviews

“…Many scholars have discussed the helpfulness of the comment from three perspectives: Information source (e.g., platform reputation [22], publisher characteristic [23], and product type [20]), information content (e.g., quality [24], quantity [25], valence [26], attribute [27], and expression [28]), and information receiver (e.g., consumer knowledge [29] and involvement [30]). They found the above factors have a significant impact on the helpfulness of reviews.…”

Designing a Framework for E-Wom and Online Reviews Adoption for Online Reservations in the Hotel Industry in the Egyptian Context

“…Therefore, e-WOM has an essential and fundamental role to enhance the process of online review and the purchasing process. Thus, the need for studying the e-WOM, e-WOM credibility and its impact on online review adoption have been raised (Xu and Yao, 2015).…”