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Research on the influence mechanism of key halo effect and Matthew effect on product online word-of-mouth: considering the moderating role of online store service quality

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Abstract

The company benefits greatly from online word-of-mouth (OWM) for its products through e-commerce platforms. However, previous research neglects the critical influence mechanism of OWM for products sold in online stores, especially the relationships between consumers’ past subjective impressions and OWM. This study innovatively explores the influence mechanism of key halo effect and Matthew effect on product OWM considering the moderating role of online store PSQ namely store trust. We propose a research model and influencing factors for the halo effect and Matthew effect in the e-commerce platform scenario. Collecting about 30,000 online reviews and 160,000 historical consumer reviews from Amazon, we use a semantic similarity model to match online reviews with a standard scale for the relevant variables, combining text mining and econometric analysis. Our results show that the selected hierarchical regression model has better fit than existing common models. And the halo effect and Matthew effect are indeed beneficial to increase product OWM including the indicators of consumer satisfaction and future consumption intention. And there is a reverse effect with low perceived service quality and star rating Matthew effect on product OWM is not supported. These findings help us understand consumers’ online comment behaviors, and have deep implications for e-commerce platforms and related companies.

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Data availability

The data generated or analyzed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

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Acknowledgments

The authors declare no conflict of interest and this research was supported by the Chinese National Natural Science Foundation (No. 71871135 and 72271155).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Management, Shanghai University, Shanghai, 200444, China

    Shugang Li & Yanfang Wei

  2. Department of Automation, East China University of Science and Technology, Shanghai, 200237, China

    Zhaoxu Yu

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Contributions

Shugang Li: Conceptualization, Writing - review & editing, Supervision, Funding acquisition. Yanfang Wei: Data curation, Methodology, Software, Investigation, Writing - original draft, Writing - review & editing. Zhaoxu Yu: Writing - review & editing, Supervision.

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Correspondence to Yanfang Wei.

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Appendices

Appendix 1

Variable

abbreviation

online word-of-mouth

OWM

evaluation score of the product

ESP

willingness to buy or recommend the product

WBRP

brand reputation of product

BRP

perceived hedonic value of product

PHVP

frequency that consumer bought products of the same brand

FBSB

the number of product reviews

NPR

perceived service quality

PSQ

Appendix 2

The pseudocode of sentiment analysis:

figure a

The pseudocode for semantic similarity analysis:

figure b

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Li, S., Wei, Y. & Yu, Z. Research on the influence mechanism of key halo effect and Matthew effect on product online word-of-mouth: considering the moderating role of online store service quality. Multimed Tools Appl 83, 13045–13072 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-023-16124-z

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