Psychometric Index Development of Online Review Helpfulness in Ecommerce Websites An Emerging Market Perspective

Abstract

Online customer written product reviews are a type of electronic word of mouth (eWOM), that have become an integral part of customers decision making process. These reviews provide the information seeking consumers with rich product related information from the customer s point of view on one hand, but on another hand their presence on the online platform may cause the problem of information overload. In order to circumvent the problem of information overload, e-tailer websites (like Amazon, Flipkart, Snapdeal etc.) started displaying the reviews according to their helpfulness, which was evaluated with the help of number of helpfulness votes received by a review (upvotes and downvotes). In the extant literature review helpfulness has been described as the extent to which a review assists the consumers making a judgment or a purchase decision (Li et al., 2013). Contemporarily, there are various ways in which the e-tailer websites are displaying the online customer reviews: number or helpfulness votes (upvotes), proportion of helpfulness votes (ratio of upvotes to total number of votes), review recency (posting date), valence (positive or negative reviews) etc. but the most used method is according to the number of helpfulness votes received by a review. newlineIn a study conducted by Wan (2015), it was found that the helpfulness voting feature suffer from psychological biases like Mathew effect and Ratchet effect. According to the Matthew effect Rich gets richer and poor gets poorer . In the context of online reviews it can be explained as, if a review has received a certain number of helpfulness votes over time, then it will continue to remain at the top most position even if more helpful reviews were written afterwards. The Matthew effect works in synchronization with the Ratchet effect, according to which if something or someone reaches to a certain extent of eminence, they generally stay at that level or at most do not fall much below that level.