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Introduction
With the growing popularity and remarkable development of Web 2.0 and information technology (IT), online consumer reviews are becoming a major source of consumers’ product evaluation and purchase decisions as a type of online feedback mechanism [also known as electronic Word-of-mouth (eWOM)] (Chevalier and Mayzlin, 2006; Dellarocas, 2003). Travel review websites (e.g. Expedia.com, Tripadvisor.com) offer various feedback functions for consumers to post their product or service reviews in the form of numerical star ratings ranging from 1 (negative) to 5 (positive) and user-generated comments about their consumption experience. Consumers’ rated scores or posted comments are explicitly and/or implicitly used as an indicator or reputation of product or service providers. According to a recent survey by eMarketer (2014), 79 per cent of consumers read online reviews when considering a purchase, and almost all of them said that online reviews influenced their purchase decisions on which channel to use when buying products online and offline. Accordingly, many firms are using online consumer reviews as their new online and offline marketing strategies (King et al., 2014; Serra Cantallops and Salvi, 2014; Aral et al., 2013). These findings indicate that online consumer reviews are believed to be a good proxy for overall WOM, and they also significantly influence consumers’ purchase decisions.
Many online companies offer dynamic mechanisms to identify reviews that consumers perceive as helpful because helpful reviews significantly influence potential consumers’ purchase decisions, leading to consumers’ positive attitudes toward online retailers or review providers (Connors et al., 2011; Kim and Gupta 2012). Prior research has shown that review helpfulness is influenced by reviewers’ characteristics such as identity-descriptive information, gender and expertise (Forman et al., 2008; Lee et al., 2011), review style and quality (Jensen et al., 2013; Li et al., 2013) and review ratings (Mudambi and Schuff, 2010). It is recognized that negative reviews are considered as more influential and helpful than positive reviews because negative opinions are rare or unexpected (Fiske, 1980), and thus provide more sensitive, unique and useful information. For instance, a recent survey by eMarketer (2011) shows that 80 per cent of respondents changed their minds about purchasing products or services after reading negative online consumer reviews. Consumers actually read review texts while reviewing the summary...