Striking a Balance: Harnessing Both the Business and Informational Value of Online Reviews through Resource-matching

Abstract

A majority of consumers now are getting used to consulting reviews before making any purchase decisions. Although we have witnessed fruitful studies in this stream of literature, there lacks sufficient knowledge regarding whether and how we can realize the information and business values simultaneously. We undertook to bridge this gap. Drawn from the cognitive tuning theory and resource-matching theory, we posit that review sentiment would intertwine with the information richness of a review to affect consumers’ judgment of review helpfulness and purchase decision. Our empirical results demonstrate that the information richness of a review, overall, moderates the U-shaped relationship between review sentiment and review helpfulness, as well as the inverted U-shaped relationship between review sentiment and consumer purchase likelihood. These findings unravel certain conditions under which increasing both purchases and review helpfulness could be achieved, which, therefore, offer non-trivial insights into business practice about review-featuring designs.