Research On Interaction Effect Of Product Price And Online Review Valence On Onlne Review Usefulness

With the prosperous of e-commerce market, purchasing online is becoming a widespread shopping way. When purchase online, for lacking of knowledge about the goods and businessman, customers need to gather more information to help them make buying decisions. Online review is an important information source for consumers. Many researchers’ study has shown that online reviews can influence customers’ purchase decision, but the usefulness of positive reviews and the usefulness of negative reviews are different. The studies about the relation between review valence and the usefulness of online reviews come to inconsistent conclusions. Product price is one of the important factors that influence customers’ purchase psychology and attitude. This study assumed that product price has an effect on the usefulness of different online reviews.This study firstly reviews the consistency theory, attribution theory and perceived risk theory and these theories may explain the reason of product price and review valence’s interaction effect on the usefulness of online review. Based one these theories, the writer proposed the hypotheses about product price and review valence’s interaction effect on the usefulness of online review. In order to verify the hypotheses through empirical study, this study built a mathematical model to express the relation between product price, review valence and the usefulness of online reviews.The author wrote a crawler program to collect online reviews on www.amzon.cn and selected the sample data from these reviews for empirical analysis. Through data analysis, the results can be summarized as follows:For low price products, positive reviews are more useful than negative reviews; For high price products, negative reviews are more useful than positive reviews; Compared to high price products, the positive reviews of low price products are more useful for customers; Compared to high price products, the negative reviews of low price products are more useful for customers; The difference between the usefulness of positive reviews and the usefulness of negative reviews for high price products is bigger than that for low price products. The conclusion of this study is a theoretical innovation on the study of the usefulness of online reviews, and it also can direct the e-commerce sites to adjust their review management strategies according to the commodity pricing.