An official website of the United States government
Despite the tremendous role of online consumer reviews (OCRs) in facilitating consumer purchase decision making, the potential inconsistency between product ratings and review content could cause the uncertainty and confusions of prospect consumers toward a product. This research is aimed to investigate such inconsistency so as to better assist potential consumers with making purchase decisions. First, this study extracted a reviewer’s sentiments from review text via sentiment analysis. Then, it examined the correlation and inconsistency between product ratings and review sentiments via Pearson correlation coefficients (PCC) and box plots. Next, we compared such inconsistency patterns between fake and authentic reviews. Based on an analysis of 24,539 Yelp reviews, we find that although the ratings and sentiments are highly correlated, the inconsistency between the two is more salient in fake reviews than in authentic reviews. The comparison also reveals different inconsistency patterns between the two types of reviews.
more »
« less
Empowering Consumer Decision-Making: Decoding Incentive vs. Organic Reviews for Smarter Choices Through Advanced Textual Analysis
Online reviews play a crucial role in influencing seller–customer dynamics. This research evaluates the credibility and consistency of reviews based on volume, length, and content to understand the impacts of incentives on customer review behaviors, how to improve review quality, and decision-making in purchases. The data analysis reveals major factors such as costs, support, usability, and product features that may influence the impact. The analysis also highlights the indirect impact of company size, the direct impact of user experience, and the varying impacts of changing conditions over the years on the volume of incentive reviews. This study uses methodologies such as Sentence-BERT (SBERT), TF-IDF, spectral clustering, t-SNE, A/B testing, hypothesis testing, and bootstrap distribution to investigate how semantic variances in reviews could be used for personalized shopping experiences. It reveals that incentive reviews have minimal to no impact on purchasing decisions, which is consistent with the credibility and consistency analysis in terms of volume, length, and content. The negligible impact of incentive reviews on purchase decisions underscores the importance of authentic online feedback. This research clarifies how review characteristics sway consumer choices and provides strategic insights for businesses to enhance their review mechanisms and customer engagement.
more »
« less
- Award ID(s):
- 2225229
- PAR ID:
- 10553602
- Publisher / Repository:
- MDPI
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Electronics
- Volume:
- 13
- Issue:
- 21
- ISSN:
- 2079-9292
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 4316
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
More Like this
-
-
The boom of e-commerce and the increasing demand for fast and reliable delivery services have led to the thriving of on-demand delivery (ODD), which provides delivery services to food takeout, grocery, pharmacy, and other light-weighted goods. The operational efficiency of ODD is subject to many factors—access to curbside, delays at the pick-up and drop-off locations, order dispatching mode, vehicle routing schedule, and vehicle refueling needs. The fast-growing delivery orders coupled with operational inefficiencies of ODD may lead to higher vehicle miles traveled (VMT) and pollutant emissions. Policymakers as well as practitioners need to evaluate the VMT and emissions impact of ODD, given the consumer behavior, operational paradigm, and business models. This paper conducted a systematic review of the existing literature to synthesize and summarize the impacts of ODD with a specific focus on VMT and emissions. The PRISMA (Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analysis) guideline was employed to systematically search for related studies in multiple databases and to crystallize the review scope. The impact evaluation was delved into three aspects: customer shopping behavior (online shopping vs. in-store shopping), ODD operational strategy (truck/van vs. green vehicles, professional delivery vs. crowdsourcing), and business models (home delivery vs. depot/collection point). Overall, this study found that online shopping with coordinated ODD can achieve significant VMT and emissions reduction compared with in-store shopping. The reduction extent depends on the customer trip chaining, travel mode choice, residential area type, and the ratio of product return. The use of zero-emissions vehicles in ODD, such as electric van/truck/vehicle, cargo-bike, UAV, provides relatively higher emissions reductions, but also brings new issues such as charging needs or capacity limits. Collection points (e.g., parcel locker, retailer store, postal service point) can reduce the VMT and emissions if they are optimally distributed, and customers visit them in zero-emissions modes or through trip chaining.more » « less
-
In this paper, we describe the results of an online field experiment examining the impacts of messaging about task novelty on the volume of volunteers’ contributions to an online citizen science project. Encouraging volunteers to provide a little more content as they work is an attractive strategy to increase the community’s output. Prior research found that an important motivation for participation in online citizen science is the wonder of being the first person to observe a particular image. To appeal to this motivation, a pop-up message was added to an online citizen science project that alerted volunteers when they were the first to annotate a particular image. Our analysis reveals that new volunteers who saw these messages increased the volume of annotations they contributed. The results of our study suggest an additional strategy to increase the amount of work volunteers contribute to online communities and citizen science projects specifically.more » « less
-
null (Ed.)In this paper, we provide a large-scale analysis of the display ad ecosystem that supports low-credibility and traditional news sites, with a particular focus on the relationship between retailers and news producers. We study this relationship from both the retailer and news producer perspectives. First, focusing on the retailers, our work reveals high-profile retailers that are frequently advertised on low-credibility news sites, including those that are more likely to be advertised on low-credibility news sites than traditional news sites. Additionally, despite high-profile retailers having more resources and incentive to dissociate with low-credibility news publishers, we surprisingly do not observe a strong relationship between retailer popularity and advertising intensity on low-credibility news sites. We also do not observe a significant difference across different market sectors. Second, turning to the publishers, we characterize how different retailers are contributing to the ad revenue stream of low-credibility news sites. We observe that retailers who are among the top-10K websites on the Internet account for a quarter of all ad traffic on low-credibility news sites. Nevertheless, we show that low-credibility news sites are already becoming less reliant on popular retailers over time, highlighting the dynamic nature of the low-credibility news ad ecosystem.more » « less
-
Due to challenges around low-quality comments and misinformation, many news outlets have opted to turn off commenting features on their websites. The New York Times (NYT), on the other hand, has continued to scale up its online discussion resources to reach large audiences. Through interviews with the NYT moderation team, we present examples of how moderators manage the first ~24 hours of online discussion after a story breaks, while balancing concerns about journalistic credibility. We discuss how managing comments at the NYT is not merely a matter of content regulation, but can involve reporting from the "community beat" to recognize emerging topics and synthesize the multiple perspectives in a discussion to promote community. We discuss how other news organizations---including those lacking moderation resources---might appropriate the strategies and decisions offered by the NYT. Future research should investigate strategies to share and update the information generated about topics in the news through the course of content moderation.more » « less
