More than words: Do emotional content and linguistic style matching matter on restaurant review helpfulness?

By Xi Wang, Liang Tang, Eojina Kim. International Journal of Hospitality Management, 2019

132 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract Many consumers feel overwhelmed by the unwieldy glut of information on peer-review websites (e.g., Yelp). Review helpfulness as a peer-rating mechanism on these websites enable consumers to quickly identify the most informative reviews and thus decreasing the information overload. The purpose of the study was to examine the influential factors on review helpfulness for restaurants on Yelp from affective content and communication style perspectives. The affective content was evaluated with eight emotional dimensions (joy, sadness, anger, fear, trust, disgust, anticipation, and surprise) in Plutchik’s emotion wheel. The communication style perspective was assessed with linguistic style matching (LSM). 262,205 pieces of consumer reviews were analyzed with negative binomial model. Both LSM and six out of the eight emotional dimensions (except anticipation and surprise) were found to have significant impact on review helpfulness. The study contributes to the knowledge body of review effectiveness from an innovative angle and provide pertinent managerial implications.

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Social Psychology, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/32bcc566d231ce807064fc32a140cdf229a55e72

How researchers see this paper

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In Artificial Intelligence

  1. Claudio Vitari
  2. Raffaele Filieri
  3. Elisabetta Raguseo

In Social Psychology

  1. Raffaele Filieri

In Sociology and Political Science

  1. Claudio Vitari
  2. Elisabetta Raguseo
  3. Raffaele Filieri
  4. Ali Abdallah Alalwan
  5. Hanqun Song
  6. Jong-Hyeong Kim

Citations in the corpus