The impacts of evaluation duration and product types on review extremity

Date09 September 2019
Pages694-709
DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1108/OIR-11-2017-0331
Published date09 September 2019
AuthorHuawei Zhu,Rungting Tu,Wenting Feng,Jiaojiao Xu
Subject MatterLibrary & information science,Information behaviour & retrieval,Collection building & management,Bibliometrics,Databases,Information & knowledge management,Information & communications technology,Internet,Records management & preservation,Document management
The impacts of evaluation
duration and product types
on review extremity
Huawei Zhu
Economics and Management School, Wuhan University, Wuhan, China
Rungting Tu
Department of Marketing and Center for Brand Relationships,
College of Management, Shenzhen University, Shenzhen, China
Wenting Feng
Center for Brand Relationships, College of Management,
Shenzhen University, Shenzhen, China, and
Jiaojiao Xu
Economics and Management School, Wuhan University, Wuhan, China
Abstract
Purpose Extreme onlinereviews can have great impactson consumerspurchase decisions.The purpose of
this paper is to investigate when users aremore likely to provide extreme ratings. The study draws inference
from attitudecertainty theory and proposesthat review extremity is influenced by the interactionof evaluation
duration and product/service types: for hedonic products/services, shorter evaluation duration can foster
attitude certainty, leading to higher review extremity; in contrast, for utilitarian products/services, longer
evaluation duration can increase attitude certainty, resulting in more extremereviews.
Design/methodology/approach Three studies were conducted to test the hypotheses: Study 1 is an empirical
analysis of 3,000 reviews from an online retailing website; Studies 2 and 3 are two between-subject experiments.
Findings Results from three studies confirm the hypotheses. Study 1 provides preliminary evidence on
how review extremity varies in evaluations of different durations and product/service types. Results from
Studies 2 and 3 show that for hedonic products/services, the shorter the evaluation duration, the more likely
users are to give extreme ratings; however, for utilitarian products/service, the longer the evaluation duration,
the more likely users are to give extreme reviews; and attitude certainty plays a mediating role between
evaluation duration and review extremity.
Originality/value Findings from this study provide understandings on when a fast rather than a slow
evaluation can lead to more extreme reviews. The results also highlight the role of usersattitude certainty in
the underlying mechanism.
Keywords Hedonic products, Attitude certainty, Evaluation duration, Extremity of reviews,
Utilitarian products
Paper type Research paper
1. Introduction
E-commerce sales are booming with accelerating speed: global online retail sales in the year
of 2017 amounted to 2.3 trillion US dollars, with an annual growth rate of 24.8 percent
(Statista, 2018). Compared with shopping in the brick-and-mortar stores, consumers often
face higher risks when shopping on e-commerce platforms because physically examining a
product or experiencing a service before making decisions can be difficult, and, at times,
infeasible (Hong et al., 2017; Luo et al., 2012; San Martín and Camarero, 2009). Online
reviews, which can help make purchase decisions and reduce uncertainty (Mudambi and
Schuff, 2010; Chua and Banerjee, 2016), have become some of the most important
Online Information Review
Vol. 43 No. 5, 2019
pp. 694-709
© Emerald PublishingLimited
1468-4527
DOI 10.1108/OIR-11-2017-0331
Received 20 November 2017
Revised 7 July 2018
4 September 2018
Accepted 28 October 2018
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at:
www.emeraldinsight.com/1468-4527.htm
Funding for this paper is provided by China Postdoctoral Science Foundation (2018M633139) and
National Natural Science Foundation of China (71672135, 71772129 and 71572116).
694
OIR
43,5
information sources for consumers (Racherla and Friske, 2012). In fact, extreme reviews are
pervasive in e-commerce: on many of the most popular retailing platforms, including Yelp
and Amazon, these online reviews often provide many extremely positive and negative
ratings but few moderate reviews (Klein et al., 2018). Studies have also shown that
consumersattitudes and behaviors are more influenced by extreme reviews, rather than
moderate ones, as they consider extreme reviews more informative and helpful (Chua and
Banerjee, 2016; Forman et al., 2008; Hong et al., 2017; Park and Nicolau, 2015).
Recognizing the power and potential impacts of online reviews, companies often
remind users to provide reviews, especially shortly after their purchase. In doing so,
companies hope to prevent users from forgetting to make their review and to encourag e
them to make evaluations when their experiences of a product/service are still vivid in
their minds. For example, online retail platforms, such as Amazon.com, often send e-mails
to remind users to provide reviews immediately after they confirm deliveries of the
products; travel websites like Booking.com frequently offer rewards such as loyalty points
and coupons to motivate users to provide ratings for hotels shortly after their stays.
Evaluation duration, which is the time users take to make reviews after reception of the
products/services, can have an impact on the extremity of their reviews. For instance,
when being reminded to review an exciting tour a few days after the trip, users are
more likely to provide a very high rating (e.g. 5-star rating) when the fun and excitement
of the tour are still fresh in their minds. In this case, when consumers evaluate a
product/service based on their own hedonic experience, a fast evaluation is more likely to
yield extreme reviews than a slow evaluation. However, when reviewing on a portable
power bank two days after consumption, users may evaluate the product based mainly on
information that can be easily acquired, such as color, weight and capacity; information on
some other important attributes, such as durability, are often not yet available at the time
of evaluation; therefore, users may still be uncertain about a product/service in a fast
evaluation and are more likely to give a moderate rating. In such circumstance, when
users evaluate a product/service based on the utilitarian values, a slow evaluation may be
morelikelytoresultinextremereviews than a fast evaluation.
Questions arise as to when a fast evaluation, rather than a slow one, can result in more
extreme reviews. This study aims to investigate when and why users are more likely to
give extreme ratings. Previous studies on online reviews have heavily discussed whether
or not users are willing to provide online reviews (Cheung and Lee, 2012; King et al., 2014;
Reimer and Benkenstein, 2016) and the underlying mechanism (Loureiro et al., 2017;
Purnawirawan et al., 2015; Ruiz-Mafe and Veloutsou, 2017). However, why and when
users choose to provide extreme reviews (e.g. 5-star or 1-star rating) are important and
under-researched. To answer the why question, we draw inferences from attitude certainty
theory and propose that the extremity of ratings is influenced by perceived certainty of
usersown attitudes toward a product/service. Second, to address the when question, we
further argue that since attitude certainty is a concurrent result of the types of evaluation
targeted and the timing of an evaluation (Rucker et al., 2014; Tormala et al.,2011),review
extremity can be influenced by the interaction between evaluation duration and product/
service types. Specifically, we propose that, for hedonic products/services whose
evaluations are based on experience, shorter evaluation duration can foster
greater attitude certainty, leading to higher review extremity; in contrast, for utilitarian
products/services whose evaluations are based on information, longer evaluation duration
can promote attitude certainty, resulting in more extreme ratings. The conceptual
framework of this study is shown in Figure 1.
The following sections of this paper are organized as follows: we first reviewed the
theoretical background of review extremity and attitude certainty. Second, we proposed two
hypotheses on the interaction effect of evaluation duration and product/service types on
695
Evaluation
duration and
product types

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