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Dissertation
WHAT HELPS AND WHAT HURTS: MODELING THE PRODUCT PERFORMANCE METRIC CONSEQUENCES OF REVIEW HELPFUL VOTES IN ONLINE PLATFORMS
Washington State University
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Washington State University
01/2022
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.7273/000004383
Handle:
https://hdl.handle.net/2376/123778
Abstract
Online platforms use online reviews as a mechanism to help customers utilize the "wisdom of crowds," overcome the hurdle of information overload, and choose the right product among the countless options on online shelf space. However, with the exponential increase in available online reviews, a new level of information overload has occurred. Online platforms use another round of crowdsourcing to overcome this second level of information overload, allowing readers to vote on the helpfulness of online reviews and identify helpful ones. The consequences of using such a voting system on review helpfulness, however, are unknown. My dissertation explores how the helpfulness mechanism (the voting mechanism on review helpfulness) alters product outcomes above and beyond the known effects of online reviews. Using a fixed-effect model on a panel data of newly published mobile applications on Google Play Store, I find that after controlling for unobserved mobile app heterogeneity, helpfulness popularity (average helpful votes of helpful reviews), and helpfulness concentration (the skewness of helpful votes) impact app installation positively. Moreover, I show that helpfulness concentration strengthens the signaling power of helpfulness popularity. Finally, I provide some evidence for the moderating role of average helpfulness valence (average star ratings of helpful reviews). These results passed several robustness checks, including but not limited to a theoretical robustness check to explore the impact of the helpfulness mechanism on firms' decisions and a Gaussian Copula approach to control for the potential endogeneity. The theoretical contribution and managerial implications are discussed.
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Details
- Title
- WHAT HELPS AND WHAT HURTS
- Creators
- Seyednasir Haghighibardineh
- Contributors
- Elizabeth Howlett (Advisor)Chadwick J Miller (Committee Member)Andrew W Perkins (Committee Member)
- Awarding Institution
- Washington State University
- Academic Unit
- Carson College of Business
- Theses and Dissertations
- Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Washington State University
- Publisher
- Washington State University
- Number of pages
- 72
- Identifiers
- 99900883135701842
- Language
- English
- Resource Type
- Dissertation