What Makes a Review Both Remunerative and Helpful? An Empirical Study of Review Sentiment and Information Richness

Businesses are recognizing the importance of developing review-featuring designs not only to enhance profitability but also to cater to the diverse review (sentiment) preferences of consumers. The existing literature, albeit generous, presents inconsistent and mixed findings for achieving the balance. In this study, we identify two significant challenges from the literature: (1) determining conditions in which detrimental effects of negative or positive reviews on consumer purchasing could be alleviated, and (2) finding conditions that ensure the review helpfulness of moderate reviews. We undertook to bridge this gap by conducting a nuanced examination of the intertwining effects of review sentiment and information richness. We first developed a theoretical foundation drawn from the cognitive tuning theory and the resource-matching theory. We then validated our hypotheses for the hotel industry with both secondary-data-based analyses and lab experimental designs. Our results demonstrate that the information richness of a review, overall, moderates the U-shaped relationship between review sentiment and review helpfulness, as well as the inverted U-shaped relationship between review sentiment and consumer purchase likelihood. These findings unravel certain conditions under which increasing both purchases and review helpfulness could be achieved. We reveal that the main determiners here lie in the (mis)match between consumers' available cognitive resources and the cognitive loads required for processing review content. Proper (mis)match conditions could desirably shape consumers' perception of information completeness and skepticism of reviews to our advantage. Our study, therefore, offers non-trivial insights into business practice as it relates especially to review-featuring designs