research-article

It's Not You, It's Me:: Identity, Self-Verification, and Amazon Reviews

Authors:

Michelle Carter,

Jin Ha LeeAuthors Info & Claims

ACM SIGMIS Database: the DATABASE for Advances in Information Systems, Volume 49, Issue 2

Pages 79 - 92

https://doi.org/10.1145/3229335.3229341

Published: 25 May 2018 Publication History

Abstract

Online retailers often incorporate crowdsourced product reviews to make customers feel more informed and comfortable with online purchases, and thus increase profits. The evaluation of these reviews is also crowdsourced, ostensibly to identify "helpful" reviews. The resulting helpfulness ratings are frequently used as measures for discerning what makes reviews helpful, and are used to determine which reviews are given priority viewing on the site. However, there is no empirical evidence that helpfulness voting reflects customers' attempts to evaluate product reviews objectively. This study examines review helpfulness voting from the position of the subjective customer rather than the objective anatomy of the review. We develop and empirically test a model, informed by self-verification theory, which explains relationships between online reviewers' overall opinions of products under consideration (star ratings), product type, and perceived helpfulness of online product reviews. Results suggest that customers' unconscious attempts to confirm what they already know and believe about themselves, referred to as self-verification, influences helpfulness voting. This work contributes to theoretical understanding of the role of reviews from the users' perspective and how, through suggesting new ways to identify helpful reviews, human behaviors can inform design of recommender systems.

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Cited By

Hohmeyer GWhitfield M(2024) Messenger vs. Message: The Curious Case of Where’d My Giggle Go? Religion & Education10.1080/15507394.2024.236833251:4(361-378)Online publication date: 20-Jun-2024
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Maddah MEsmaeilzadeh PMirzaei T(2023)An Experimental Study to Examine Relationships Between IT Identity and Users’ Post-Adoption Behaviors for Different Types of Health ApplicationsInformation Systems Management10.1080/10580530.2023.223718741:3(238-264)Online publication date: 19-Jul-2023
https://doi.org/10.1080/10580530.2023.2237187
Furl K(2022)Denigrating Women, Venerating “Chad”: Ingroup and Outgroup Evaluations among Male Supremacists on RedditSocial Psychology Quarterly10.1177/0190272522109090785:3(279-299)Online publication date: 1-Jun-2022
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Published In

cover image ACM SIGMIS Database: the DATABASE for Advances in Information Systems

ACM SIGMIS Database: the DATABASE for Advances in Information Systems Volume 49, Issue 2

May 2018

92 pages

ISSN:0095-0033

EISSN:1532-0936

DOI:10.1145/3229335

Editors:
Stacie Petter
Baylor University, Waco, TX
,
Tom Stafford
Louisiana Tech University, Ruston, LA
,
Xihui "Paul" Zhang
Northern Alabama University, Florence, AL

Issue’s Table of Contents

Copyright © 2018 ACM.

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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Association for Computing Machinery

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Publication History

Published: 25 May 2018

Published in SIGMIS Volume 49, Issue 2

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Cited By

Hohmeyer GWhitfield M(2024) Messenger vs. Message: The Curious Case of Where’d My Giggle Go? Religion & Education10.1080/15507394.2024.236833251:4(361-378)Online publication date: 20-Jun-2024
https://doi.org/10.1080/15507394.2024.2368332
Maddah MEsmaeilzadeh PMirzaei T(2023)An Experimental Study to Examine Relationships Between IT Identity and Users’ Post-Adoption Behaviors for Different Types of Health ApplicationsInformation Systems Management10.1080/10580530.2023.223718741:3(238-264)Online publication date: 19-Jul-2023
https://doi.org/10.1080/10580530.2023.2237187
Furl K(2022)Denigrating Women, Venerating “Chad”: Ingroup and Outgroup Evaluations among Male Supremacists on RedditSocial Psychology Quarterly10.1177/0190272522109090785:3(279-299)Online publication date: 1-Jun-2022
https://doi.org/10.1177/01902725221090907
Saptono RMine T(2020)Time-based Sampling Methods for Detecting Helpful Reviews2020 IEEE/WIC/ACM International Joint Conference on Web Intelligence and Intelligent Agent Technology (WI-IAT)10.1109/WIIAT50758.2020.00076(508-513)Online publication date: Dec-2020
https://doi.org/10.1109/WIIAT50758.2020.00076
Kitirattarkarn GTao WTsai W(2020)Intended audience and valence of electronic word-of-mouth on social media: a study of Dutch consumersInternet Research10.1108/INTR-03-2020-013331:3(990-1017)Online publication date: 31-Dec-2020
https://doi.org/10.1108/INTR-03-2020-0133

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