Research On The Influencing Factors Of Consumers’ Online Reviews And Their Perceived Usefulness Based On The Perspective Of Attribution Theory

With the rapid development of e-commerce, more and more people begin to participate in online shopping, and at the same time, their decisions are more and more influenced by the risks and uncertainties due to the virtuality of online shopping. Though online reviews can help customers solve the problem of information asymmetry to some extent. For consumers, only helpful online reviews can help them to make their purchase decisions better. Therefore, in recent years, scholars have been studying the relationship between online reviews and consumers’perceived helpfulness.Currently, scholars are mainly studying the influence of the online reviews on consumers’perceived helpfulness, but the influences of review publishers’ and readers’ personality traits on the formation and mechanism of online reviews are usually ignored. In addition, scholars have begun to study and explain online reviews from the perspective of attribution theory in recent years, but the relevant research is lack in depth and needs to be further systematacially explored. Base on the above, this paper explored the locus of control’s influence on the formation and mechanism of online reviews from the reviews publishers and readers respectively based on the attribution theory.Based on the above background, this paper mainly discussed three topics:firstly, the antecedent effect of reviews publishers’ locus of control on the formation of online reviews; secondly, the influence of online reviews on consumers’ perceived helpfulness; thirdly, the moderation effect of review readers’ locus of control between online reviews and consumers’ perceived helpfulness.This paper used the questionnaire survey, mainly based on a platform called "So Jump", and collected a total of312valid questionnaires and processed and analysed research data by statistical analysis software SPSS20.0. The results showed that:firstly, reviews publishers whose locus of control was prone to be internal usually had longer and higher quality online reviews; secondly, customers had stronger perceived helpfulness of online reviews if they were more objective, higher in quality, longer in length, larger in quantity. Negative reviews were more helpful for consumers’ decision-making than positive reviews; thirdly, the readers’ locus of control moderated the relationship between online reviews’ expression, direction, length, quality, quantity and consumers’perceived helpfulness; fourthly, each variable was significantly influenced by the differences of the respondents’sex, age, occupation, monthly income, monthly cost, internet surfing experience and the frequency of viewing or making online reviews.The results suggest that consumers can deal with and participate in shopping and online reviews by learning and developing locus of control. Meanwhile, business should actively cooperate with electronic business platform to get consumers’locus of control effectively, and to take appropriate measures on consumers of different locus of control. Furthermore, electronic business platform should pay attention to developing the functionality of online review and information feedback, maintain the impartiality and objectivity of online reviews, and guide businesses and consumers to participate in online review healthily and reasonably.Three innovations are shown in this paper:(1) Innovative research perspective. This paper has individual locus of control as a start point of attribution theory, focusing on the antecedent effect of consumers’locus of control on the formation of online reviews and the moderator effect between online reviews and consumers’ perceived helpfulness.(2) Comprehensive study variables. Variables studied in this paper included antecedent variables, independent variable, dependent variables and moderator variables, thus to reflect the influence of individual locus of control on the formation of online review and their perceived helpfulness comprehensively and systematically.(3) Innovative research findings. This paper proved that the consumer’s locus of control impacted the online reviews and their helpfuless siginificantly. These conclusions enriched and improved the studies on online review and its’ helpfuless.Finally, this paper pointed out the inadequacy and further research directions.