The Reverse Effect of Reviewers’ Sentiment Tendency: The Role of Readers’ Empathy and Trust

Abstract

Streamers have become a crucial component of consumers’ live shopping experience. Reviewers will transfer their emotions about the streamer to the product-after review. We innovatively verified the reverse effect of reviewers’ sentiment tendency toward streamer on the product sustained sale in the streamer’s live streaming. Results from a field data set and three lab experiments show that reviewers’ positive sentiment tendency toward the streamer has a negative effect on the readers’ purchase intention when the streamer resale this product in his live streaming. While reviewers’ negative sentiment tendency toward the streamer can enhance readers’ purchase intention to the product resold in the streamer’s live streaming. These effects are separately mediated by readers’ trust in the review and their empathy to the streamer. And the two mediators are moderated by the streamer’s expertise. Our findings expand the literatures about reviews’ emotions and suggest implications for streamers, retailers, and review platforms faced with the task of managing live-shopping reviews.

Keywords:

• Live shopping
• sentiment tendency
• reviews
• product sale
• trust
• empathy
• expertise

Acknowledgment

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: National Natural Science Foundation of China (72272045, 71831005).

Ethical approval

This article does not contain any studies with human beings and animal subjects performed by any of the authors.

Data availability statement

The datasets generated during and/or analyzed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 A leading online experiment platform in China.

Additional information

Funding

This study was funded by National Natural Science Foundation of China (72272045, 71831005).

Notes on contributors

Pengyu Li

Pengyu Li, doctor of School of management Harbin Institute of Technology, Main research directions: consumer behavior both online and offline; cross platform marketing, decision-making model (School of management Harbin Institute of Technology, Harbin Institute of Technology, Harbin, China).

Jingbo Shao

Jingbo Shao, professor of School of management Harbin Institute of Technology, Main research directions: consumer behavior both online and offline; cross platform marketing (School of management Harbin Institute of Technology, Harbin Institute of Technology, Harbin, China).