The Effects Of Layout And Product Involvement Of Online Reviews On Consumer Attitude

The research question of this paper is to explore the moderating effectof the layout and the product involvement on the valence of online reviews.From the data of the experiment, we found that the layout of the onlinereviews has moderating effect on the negative review. The tightness of thelayout will effect consumer attitude on the products, a tighter page layoutleads to a more negative effect of the negative reviews. However, sucheffect does not exist when there are only positive reviews, or when thereare both positive and negative reviews. Product involvement has nosignificant moderating effect on consumer attitude under the circumstanceof this experiment. We suggest that the online review gatekeepers shouldcontrol the effect of negative online reviews by adjusting the layout of thereview pages. When there are full of negative reviews, it is better tobroaden the page layout between each reviews so that the negativeness canbe slightly weaken and the consumer attitude will be better.