The effects of review sidedness in electronic word of mouth

• Main Authors: Min-qian Li, 李閩茜
• Other Authors: 吳玲玲
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2018
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/y39793

碩士 === 國立臺灣大學 === 資訊管理學研究所 === 106 === The main purpose of this paper is to investigate the effect of sidedness of electronic WOM on perceived helpfulness. Two-sided online reviews are more truthful than one-sided online reviews to reflect product experience but also harder to process. From the perspective of information processing, we proposed product-related attribution (the extent to attribute a review caused by product quality rather than reviewer’s preference) as a mediator on the effect of review sidedness onto perceived helpfulness and verified a significant mediation effect. Product type and need for cognition were considered as moderator to influence attribution and perceived helpfulness of a review due to different cognitive resources invested in review reading. Positive and negative reviews were all included in our experiments to represent one-sided conditions. On the one hand, two-sided reviews were more likely to generate a higher level of product-related attribution on search goods rather than experience goods. On the other hand, individuals with high need for cognition are more likely to attributed two-sided reviews on product-related factors. As for perceived helpfulness, when only compared two-sided reviews with one-sided positive reviews, review sidedness showed a stronger effect for search goods than experience goods, and also a stronger effect for participants low in need for cognition rather than those high in need for cognition, which did not fully support our hypothesis. We also tried to explain this phenomenon in this paper.