Revisiting online reviews: signals of latent reviewer traits mediate the review length-helpfulness relationship

ABSTRACT

Consumers evaluate the helpfulness of online reviews using both characteristics of the review and the reviewer. We explore whether online review length signals latent information about the reviewer’s credibility, reflected by the reviewer’s honesty and social status. Analyzing a dataset of online reviews, we show that review length has opposing curvilinear relationships with reviewer honesty and social status. Taken together, long and short reviews communicate that the reviewer is less honest, but has higher social status, while medium length reviews signal greater reviewer honesty, but lower social status. Further, reviewer honesty and social status each mediate the review lengthhelpfulness relationship.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The data used in this research are available from the corresponding author upon request.

Notes

¹ The Body Shop website has undergone changes that have made more reviewer information available to the public than what was available at the point of data collection (April 2018). Therefore, the control variables used reflect the information available from 2011–2018.