Review Writing: The Social Influence of "Exemplar" Reviews
44 Pages Posted: 6 Dec 2022 Last revised: 7 Dec 2022
Date Written: December 2, 2022
Abstract
Online review platforms often design interventions that highlight individual recognition (e.g., status badges, exemplar review awards), and these interventions have been reported to influence the review contribution of recognized recipients positively. However, these interventions are offered to only a minority of platform users, and limited research exists that explains how reviews written by recipients of such interventions result in second-order effects on non-recipients' contributions. In this paper, we exploit a quasi-experimental setting on a prominent Asian review platform to study the effect of exemplar reviews on the review-generating behavior of users who read them. Our results, derived from several econometric and natural language processing techniques, empirically demonstrate that users increase their contributions, both in quantity and quality, after reading exemplar reviews. We also find that users model their writing style based on the exemplar reviews they read. In addition, the review-writing experience of a user appears to moderate the effect of an exemplar review. Specifically, we find reviewers with less review-writing experience, compared to users with higher experience, respond more positively to exemplar reviews, resulting in relatively higher review quantity and longer reviews. However, reviews written by these users with less experience are less readable and are also perceived as less helpful when compared to reviews written by users with more experience. Further analyses revealed that the subsequent reviews of a user who read an exemplar review, become increasingly similar over time (i.e., the variance of review length, sentiment, readability, and topic diversity reduced). This conformity among the user's own reviews indicates a self-herding effect previously unreported in the user-generated content literature. Insights from this work yield important practical implications for how platform managers can use the exemplar review programs to make their review platforms more sustainable.
Keywords: Online review, NLP, social influence, review-generating behavior, platform policy
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