The Reviewer Matters: A Study of Online Pictorial Reviews

With the emergence of online pictorial reviews, reviewer’s image becomes available information for later-buyers. But whether and how reviewer’s image would influence consumers’ product evaluation still remains unclear. In this study, we investigate how reviewer attractiveness, a newly available reviewer attribute enabled by pictorial reviews, would interact with two existing attributes of textual reviews (i.e., review valence and review depth) in influencing consumers’ purchase intention. In particular, drawing on the Source Effect Models, we hypothesize that reviewer attractiveness would only influence consumers’ purchase intention when review valence is positive, and propose that review depth would moderate the image attractiveness effect. Lab experiments are designed to test our hypotheses. This study contributes to the online review literature by investigating reviewer attractiveness effect in online pictorial reviews. It also extends the source effect literature to the user-generated online review context. It provides important practical implications for online retailers and online review participants.

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