Distinguishing consumer behavior diversities in different markets based on online reviews

Abstract

This study aims to investigate how does market differences influence consumers behavior when reading online reviews. To this end, we propose a conceptual model from the perspective of content quality and source quality to explore the determinants of review helpfulness. We demonstrate that consumers ranking behaviors show differences in different movie markets, due to the cultural influences. We collected reviews from IMDB.com (the famous US movie database) and douban.com (the famous China movie database). The results demonstrate that there are significant differences across two different movie markets (China and US). Specifically, online reviews length, review extremity, reviewer centrality and reviewer experience have great positive impact on reviews usefulness. We found that long sentences and the extreme emotion has much bigger helpfulness and persuasive effects in individualist societies (US) than collectivist societies (China); while the effects of reviewer centrality and reviewer experience to review usefulness are inclined to be same in two markets. The findings give a better understanding of online reviewer behaviors across different markets and provide important insights into emerging movie markets such as China.