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ABSTRACT
Customers often search online for product reviews to make an informed buying decision. People write about their experience with the product in a review that often expresses a variety of emotions. How these emotions affect the helpfulness of the review is an intriguing but insufficiently studied question. Do discrete emotions have differential informational value in this case? Here, we build on cognitive appraisal theory to examine how discrete emotions (e.g., hope, happiness, anxiety, and disgust) embedded in the reviews affect the helpfulness votes of potential customers. We hypothesize that reviews where emotions associated with certainty are expressed will have a positive effect on review helpfulness and vice versa, regardless of their valence. Moreover, certainty mediates this effect. We adopted a quantitative content analysis approach (latent semantic analysis or LSA) to measure emotional content in these reviews. Findings demonstrate that discrete emotions have differential effects on the helpfulness of the reviews. The paper contributes to the better understanding of framing effects of discrete emotions.
Notes
1. We thank an anonymous reviewer for this argument.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Shimi Naurin Ahmad
SHIMI NAURIN AHMAD is an assistant professor in the Department of Business Administration at Morgan State University. She holds an M.S. in Electrical Engineering and Ph.D in Marketing from Concordia University, Canada. Her research interests include online consumer behavior and application of data/text mining techniques in marketing. She has presented her work at conferences such as the Academy of Marketing Science and Advanced Research Techniques Forum. Her work has appeared in the Journal of Business Research.
Michel Laroche
MICHEL LAROCHE is the Royal Bank Distinguished Professor at Concordia University and the managing editor of the Journal of Business Research. He holds a Ph.D. (Columbia), a D.Sc. honoris causa (Guelph), is a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, American Psychological Association, Society for Marketing Advances, and Academy of Marketing Science. He was the 2000 Concordia University Research Fellow, received the 2000 Jacques-Rousseau Medal, the Living Legend of Marketing Award (2002), and the Sprott Leader in Business Research & Practice Award (2003). His main research interests are in the areas of consumer behavior, marketing communications (including Internet marketing and social media), and services marketing. Within consumer behavior, he is mainly interested in the role of culture and in brand decision processes. He has published over 150 journal articles in, among others, the Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, Journal of Retailing, International Journal of Information Management, Marketing Letters, and Journal of Advertising Research; he has presented papers at more than 150 conferences; he has co-authored twenty-six textbooks, and several book chapters.