Emotions for attention in online consumer reviews: the moderated mediating role of review helpfulness

Purpose With the increasing importance of e-commerce to the economy and people's lives, user-generated content, such as electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM) represented by online reviews, has exploded. On one hand, it is of great significance for review consumers (readers) to identify high-quality ones from a large number of existing reviews to assist their purchase decision. On the other hand, how to use appropriate strategies to make their published reviews more concerned by others is also important to review generators (reviewers). The purpose of this study is to understand the comprehensive relationship among review characteristics, review helpfulness and receiver attention. Design/methodology/approach This study uses the online movie reviews obtained from the most popular review platform in China to conduct multiple empirical analyses. Findings The results show that the review helpfulness plays a mediating role between the emotional characteristics of online reviews and the receiver attention, and such a mediating role is more significant among reviewers with rich review expertise. The reviewer's expertise also moderates the impact of review emotions on review helpfulness. Originality/value This work studies eWOM receiver involvement, which can ultimately impact product sales, but seldom be investigated in eWOM domain. Therefore, this research can enrich studies on eWOM and provide valuable practical implications as well.