To Tell, Not to Yell: The Effect of Writer's Intents on Readers’ Perceived Helpfulness of Online Product Reviews

Perceived review helpfulness has been investigated extensively; however, the influence of the review writer's intents behind a review has not been considered. This study investigates the effect of the writer's intents to provide information, express emotions, or call for action on reviews’ helpfulness, thereby bridging the gap between the writer's perspective and the reader's perspective. The writer's intents are operationalized through speech acts, an implicit, yet systematic, approach in which the intents of the writer are captured at the linguistic level, that is, how things are said. A unique parallel approach based on both readers’ perceptions and linguistic theory is used to operationalize the speech acts. This approach allows multiple speech acts per sentence, and it can estimate the influence of each speech act separately. The results show that assertive acts positively impact review helpfulness, whereas expressive and call-for-action acts have a negative effect. This confirms previous literature showing that the major drivers of review helpfulness are often related to information delivery. In this research, the idea that consumers like reviews with accurate information is detected at the level of the writer's intent, which is new in the context of text analysis to assess online review helpfulness.