Perceived Usefulness of Word-of-Mouth: An Analysis of Sentimentality in Product Reviews

People may regard some word-of-mouths (WOMs) as more useful than others. Review valance, emotion, and concreteness are the antecedents which may influence people’s perceived usefulness of the WOMs. This study collected online customer reviews from Amazon.com and conduct regression analysis and Partial Least Squares (PLS) analysis to analyse the data. The findings revealed that negativity bias does exist, with negative reviews deemed as more useful than positive reviews. Besides, the research also revealed that online customer reviews with more positive emotion expression are perceived as less useful. However, online customer reviews with more negative emotion expression are perceived more useful. In addition, online customer reviews with longer review length are perceived as more useful than shorter online customer reviews.

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