Evaluating Content Quality and Usefulness of Online Product Reviews

32 Pages Posted: 18 Aug 2008 Last revised: 10 Jan 2013

See all articles by Nikolaos Korfiatis

Nikolaos Korfiatis

University of East Anglia (UEA) - Norwich Business School

Date Written: July 7, 2008

Abstract

Online product reviews are an important resource for consumers in online marketplaces because they provide a useful source of support information during the purchase of goods. Furthermore, in some online marketplaces consumers have the opportunity to evaluate the usefulness of a review by using a binary evaluation interface provided by the online marketplace. These evaluations produce a usefulness score, which is calculated as a fraction of helpful votes out of the total votes that a review has received. The results of these evaluations indicate that the usefulness score of a particular review is significantly affected by the qualitative characteristics of the review as measured by readability tests applied to a large dataset of reviews collected from the United Kingdom section of the popular online marketplace Amazon.

Keywords: Online Reviews, Readability Tests, Experience Goods

Suggested Citation

Korfiatis, Nikolaos, Evaluating Content Quality and Usefulness of Online Product Reviews (July 7, 2008). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=1156321 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1156321

Nikolaos Korfiatis (Contact Author)

University of East Anglia (UEA) - Norwich Business School ( email )

Norwich
NR4 7TJ
United Kingdom