The effect of review content richness on product review helpfulness: The moderating role of rating inconsistency

Many consumers provide lengthy but minimal informative reviews just to meet the word count requirement in e-commerce platforms. Not only do these non-informative reviews not help consumers identify product quality, but they increase the information processing burden. In this paper, we propose review content richness to evaluate informative reviews and investigate the relationship between review content richness and review helpfulness. On the basis of the elaboration likelihood model, we then examine the moderating effect of rating inconsistency. We find that: (1) the relationship between review content richness and review helpfulness follows an inverted U-shape, (2) this relationship is moderated by rating inconsistency, and (3) the effects of review content richness on review helpfulness are heterogeneous under positive and negative rating inconsistencies. An inverted U-shape relationship exists under positive rating inconsistency, but the nonlinear relationship shifts from an inverted U-shape to a monotonous positivity under negative rating inconsistency.