Start Date
11-12-2016 12:00 AM
Description
We analyze the spillover effect of online product reviews on purchases using a clickstream data from a large retailer by investigating (a) whether the products are complementary/substitutive; (b) whether the products are from the same or a different brand, and (c) which media channel (mobile or PC) is used. To identify complementary/substitutive products, we used a text-mining approach of topic modeling on product descriptions to quantify functional similarity of pairwise products. Our empirical analysis shows that the mean rating of online reviews of substitutive products has a negative role in purchasing, while the rating of complementary products has a positive role. Also, we find the negative spillover effect among substitutive products of different brands to be significantly greater than those of the same brand and for consumers who used mobile devices versus traditional PCs. Our study has implications on leveraging the spillover effect of online product reviews on substitutive/complementary products.
Recommended Citation
Kwark, Young; Lee, Gene Moo; Pavlou, Paul; and Qiu, Liangfei, "The Spillover Effects of User-Generated Online Product Reviews on Purchases: Evidence from Clickstream Data" (2016). ICIS 2016 Proceedings. 11.
https://aisel.aisnet.org/icis2016/EBusiness/Presentations/11
The Spillover Effects of User-Generated Online Product Reviews on Purchases: Evidence from Clickstream Data
We analyze the spillover effect of online product reviews on purchases using a clickstream data from a large retailer by investigating (a) whether the products are complementary/substitutive; (b) whether the products are from the same or a different brand, and (c) which media channel (mobile or PC) is used. To identify complementary/substitutive products, we used a text-mining approach of topic modeling on product descriptions to quantify functional similarity of pairwise products. Our empirical analysis shows that the mean rating of online reviews of substitutive products has a negative role in purchasing, while the rating of complementary products has a positive role. Also, we find the negative spillover effect among substitutive products of different brands to be significantly greater than those of the same brand and for consumers who used mobile devices versus traditional PCs. Our study has implications on leveraging the spillover effect of online product reviews on substitutive/complementary products.