Abstract
Online reviews play pivotal roles in the dissemination of information and provide essential mechanisms for consumers to express opinions and make purchasing decisions. In recent years, review inconsistency as a peculiar phenomenon has triggered several challenges, including consumer confusion, the spread of misinformation, and a decline in market competitiveness, etc. To mitigate these effects of inconsistency, we investigate review inconsistency in two aspects, rating sentiment inconsistency and rating dispersion, and examine the different effects on product sales. In this paper, we employ the theoretical framework of HSM to develop an empirical model and collect 94,843 reviews from JD.com. The findings indicate that rating sentiment inconsistency exerts a negative impact on product sales. Conversely, rating dispersion has a positive effect on sales. Furthermore, rating dispersion and timeliness act as moderators, mitigating the negative impact of sentiment inconsistency on sales, while review richness intensifies this negative impact.
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Acknowledgement
This research is partly supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China [72272066, 71971101, 72372060, and 71972090], General Project of Philosophy and Social Science Research in Universities in Jiangsu Province [2022SJYB2238], Jiangsu University of Science and Technology Youth Science and Technology Innovation Project [1042922212].
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Lu, Y., Jia, Y., Wang, N., Ge, S. (2024). Does Online Review Inconsistency Matter? The Effect of Inconsistency on Product Sales. In: Tu, Y.P., Chi, M. (eds) E-Business. New Challenges and Opportunities for Digital-Enabled Intelligent Future. WHICEB 2024. Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, vol 516. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-60260-3_11
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-60260-3_11
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