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The impact of the Entropy of review text sentiments on movie box office sales

Published: 03 August 2015 Publication History

Abstract

This study examines the impact of the ratios of review text sentiments on product sales. The sentiments of online WOM are often mixed, since individuals usually have different preferences toward the same products. Past studies have focused on online WOM effects by measuring WOM's volume and valence. However, few studies have investigated how the ratios of relevant (positive or negative) and irrelevant review text influence product sales. Consumers often read review texts when they don't have enough information from WOM valence and volume. As WOM valence and volume are usually provided by an aggregation level, consumers often do not have enough information. Thus, reading the review texts has become an important process for consumers in making purchase decisions. However, when consumers encounter too many positive reviews, they may doubt the credibility of online WOM. Thus, this study analyzes the ratios of review text sentiments by conducting text mining techniques. We classify review texts into positive, negative, and leftover (or irrelevant) categories and create an Entropy variable to measure the ratios of review text sentiments. A high level of Entropy in review texts indicates that the sentiments of review texts are equally distributed, but not biased toward positive or negative sentiments. We estimate our research model with the Entropy variable in a panel dataset for 204 movies over a half-year period. The results suggest that Entropy level in review texts has a positive impact on movie box office sales when the Entropy is combined with WOM valence and volume. The findings imply that deleting negative reviews to enhance product sales may not help online retailers or related parties.

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  • (2024)Post diversity: A new lens of social media WOMJournal of Business Research10.1016/j.jbusres.2023.114329170(114329)Online publication date: Jan-2024
  • (2024)The Current Status and Trends of Cross-Border E-commerce DevelopmentUser-Driven Cross-Border E-Commerce Platform Competition and Policy Analysis10.1007/978-981-97-3835-9_1(1-68)Online publication date: 4-Oct-2024

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cover image ACM Other conferences
ICEC '15: Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Electronic Commerce 2015
August 2015
268 pages
ISBN:9781450334617
DOI:10.1145/2781562
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 03 August 2015

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Author Tags

  1. Entropy
  2. consumer information search
  3. electronic commerce
  4. motion picture
  5. online user reviews
  6. word-of-mouth

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ICEC '15 Paper Acceptance Rate 39 of 55 submissions, 71%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 150 of 244 submissions, 61%

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View all
  • (2024)Post diversity: A new lens of social media WOMJournal of Business Research10.1016/j.jbusres.2023.114329170(114329)Online publication date: Jan-2024
  • (2024)The Current Status and Trends of Cross-Border E-commerce DevelopmentUser-Driven Cross-Border E-Commerce Platform Competition and Policy Analysis10.1007/978-981-97-3835-9_1(1-68)Online publication date: 4-Oct-2024

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