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Understanding the information characteristics of consumers’ online reviews: the evidence from Chinese online apparel shopping

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Abstract

Online reviews are essential to consumers' decision-making when purchasing products on e-commerce platforms. Most of the existing research conducts sentiment analysis on online reviews, yet the disclosure characteristics of these reviews have not received sufficient attention. Therefore, this paper evaluated the information characteristics of online reviews using review length, readability, redundancy, and specificity indicators. By collecting 18,131 online clothing reviews, we applied Latent Dirichlet allocation to divide the review texts into nine topics. We also investigate the relationship between review text characteristics and review sentiment and verify the robustness of the results using different regression models. We conclude that a review with more words, higher redundancy, lower fog index, and lower specificity tends to express a more positive emotion of the review. Our research will help e-commerce platforms construct general review writing guidelines to improve consumer satisfaction.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by grants from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (72001223, 72371258), the Program for "Elite Scholars" in Central University of Finance and Economics, and the Program for Innovation Research in Central University of Finance and Economics

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Management Science and Engineering, Central University of Finance and Economics, No. 39 Xueyuan South Road, Haidian District, Beijing, 100081, China

    Lu Wei & Maoze Wang

  2. Department of Humanities, Social and Political Sciences, ETH Zurich, Haldeneggsteig 4, Zurich, 8006, Switzerland

    Shufan Ma

  3. School of Architecture and the Built Environment, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, 10044, Sweden

    Shufan Ma

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  1. Lu Wei
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Appendix A

Appendix A

Table 12 OLS Robustness check by topics
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Table 13 Tobit Robustness check by topics
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Wei, L., Ma, S. & Wang, M. Understanding the information characteristics of consumers’ online reviews: the evidence from Chinese online apparel shopping. Electron Commer Res (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10660-023-09784-4

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