Research On The Impact Of Negative Emotions On Online Review Helpfulness And Related Moderators

The proliferation of internet technologies has made it effortless for customers to share their product experiences through online reviews.These reviews serve as a guide for other potential consumers to make informed purchasing decisions.However,the sheer quantity of reviews available,as well as their varying quality,often makes it challenging for consumers to find useful information quickly.To address this issue,many review platforms have introduced voting systems,allowing customers to vote for helpful reviews.By investigating the essential elements of helpful reviews,review platforms can not only filter out irrelevant information but also assist consumers in making better purchasing decisions quickly.Additionally,businesses can identify reviews that are more likely to be adopted by customers and manage their electronic word-of-mouth more effectively.Prior research has demonstrated that negative emotions expressed in online reviews can influence consumers’ perceptions of the reviews’ helpfulness.Among the most common negative emotions are anger and anxiety.However,there is a lack of consensus among existing studies on the associations between these emotions and the perceived helpfulness of reviews.To reconcile these conflicting findings and investigate the underlying mechanisms,this paper aims to examine how two often overlooked environmental cues,namely rating dispersion and price level,moderate the relationships between anger and anxiety and review helpfulness.Drawing on Emotion as Social Information(EASI)theory,Signaling theory,and Cognitive Appraisal theory,this paper conducted an empirical study on service review data from Yelp.com to analyze and validate the proposed research content.The study utilized linear regressions to investigate the relationship between emotions(anger and anxiety),review helpfulness,and the moderating effects of rating dispersion and price level.The results indicate a positive association between anger and anxiety and review helpfulness in most cases,with rating dispersion and price level having moderating effects on these relationships.Specifically,when rating dispersion is higher,the positive effects of anger and anxiety on review helpfulness increase,while higher price levels result in decreased positive effects.Moreover,the study suggests that the moderation effect of the price level is more pronounced in terms of anger.The conclusions were validated through two robustness checks:the variable substitution method and the model variation method.This paper aims to extend the current understanding of how emotions expressed in online reviews may affect consumers’ perceptions of review helpfulness by examining two moderators,using the perspectives of emotion and information processing theories.Moreover,the conclusions of this study offer practical implications for both online retailers and third-party platforms on how to effectively manage their online reviews,as well as for consumers on how to efficiently filter useful information from a plethora of reviews.