Antecedents of Online Customers Reviews' Helpfulness: A Support Vector Machine Approach

Online customer reviews (OCRs) have become an important part of online customers’ decision making and People use online reviews to make decision to buy or not to buy products and services. This study aims to answer two research questions: (1) what are the antecedents of helpfulness of online reviews based on their contents? (2) How do content-based cues on OCRs influence their helpfulness? We posit a research model to study the effect of peripheral and central cues in OCRs on online review helpfulness. Online review web pages will be collected from Amazon website using a web crawler. This article will be one of the first studies that investigate OCRs helpfulness based on the central cues in the text of the review. In addition, this research will be the first study that applied the support vector machine as a machine learning method to analyze the text of OCRs.

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