Impact of National Culture on Online Consumer Review Behavior

This research aims to investigate culture impact on the content of helpful online consumer reviews. Two distinct cultures, American and Chinese, were selected for comparison. The hypothesized culture effects were empirically examined with online customer reviews data collected from both amazon.com and amazon.cn. The data was first analyzed with a qualitative method to encode the content of online reviews, and then the encoded data were analyzed with a quantitative method to test the hypotheses. The results show that American reviews are more likely to express their own opinions on products and American reviews contain more recommendations to others than Chinese reviews. In addition, Chinese and American customer reviews focus on different aspects of the products. The findings of this study can be used to improve customer relationship and product marketing in globalized e-commerce.

[1]  Lina Zhou,et al.  Ontology-supported polarity mining , 2008 .

[2]  David Schuff,et al.  What Makes a Helpful Review? A Study of Customer Reviews on Amazon.com , 2010 .

[3]  David J. Pauleen,et al.  Practical wisdom and the development of cross-cultural knowledge management: a global leadership perspective , 2010 .

[4]  K. Evans,et al.  The Influence of Spirituality on Buyer Perception Within Business-to-Business Marketing Relationships: A Cross-Cultural Exploration and Comparison , 2010 .

[5]  Xiaolan Fu,et al.  The Impact of Individualism—Collectivism, Social Presence, and Group Diversity on Group Decision Making Under Majority Influence , 2007, J. Manag. Inf. Syst..

[6]  Detmar W. Straub,et al.  Toward a Theory-Based Measurement of Culture , 2002, J. Glob. Inf. Manag..

[7]  Izak Benbasat,et al.  Research Note: The Influence of Recommendations and Consumer Reviews on Evaluations of Websites , 2006, Inf. Syst. Res..

[8]  James Price Dillard,et al.  Cultural and situational influences on the process of persuasive strategy selection , 1982 .

[9]  Huiping Huang,et al.  A Cross-Cultural Test of the Spiral of Silence , 2005 .

[10]  Michael D. Smith,et al.  All Reviews are Not Created Equal: The Disaggregate Impact of Reviews and Reviewers at Amazon.Com , 2008 .

[11]  Christopher P. Blocker.  Modeling customer value perceptions in cross-cultural business markets , 2011 .

[12]  G. Hofstede.  The Cultural Relativity of Organizational Practices and Theories , 1983 .

[13]  Donnavieve N. Smith,et al.  Online Peer and Editorial Recommendations, Trust, and Choice in Virtual Markets , 2005 .

[14]  Gi Woong Choi,et al.  Cultural dimensions for user experience: cross-country and cross-product analysis of users' cultural characteristics , 2008 .

[15]  Anindya Ghose,et al.  Examining the Relationship Between Reviews and Sales: The Role of Reviewer Identity Disclosure in Electronic Markets , 2008, Inf. Syst. Res..

[16]  E. Clemons,et al.  When Online Reviews Meet Hyperdifferentiation: A Study of the Craft Beer Industry , 2006 .