Heart over Heels? An Empirical Analysis of the Relationship between Emotions and Review Helpfulness for Experience and Credence Goods

Heart over Heels? An Empirical Analysis of the Relationship between Emotions and Review Helpfulness for Experience and Credence Goods

According to current scholarly and practitioner thinking, one way of enhancing the perceived helpfulness of reviews is by encouraging the use of emotional language. Yet, studies on review helpfulness have paid little attention to studying this effect as it applies to different product types, namely experience and credence goods. Using data from amazon.com, we conduct an empirical test using a natural language understanding algorithm. Our results suggest that for both experience and credence goods, fear, joy, and sadness are correlated with an increase in review helpfulness, whereas anger is negatively correlated with it. These emotions are perceived as more helpful for experience goods than for credence goods.