Faculty Research: OIM Professor Studies How Online Consumer Reviews Impact Purchase Decisions

During Holiday Shopping Season, Take Note of How Reviews Affect What You Buy

When pondering an online purchase on Amazon, most consumers never click “add to cart” without first scrolling through the consumer reviews section to ensure product quality. But what if the quality of those reviews is actually preventing the consumer from making an informed decision about whether to buy a product?

That's what Zhanfei Lei, assistant professor of operations and information management at the Isenberg School of Management, explores in a 2021 paper she co-wrote with fellow researchers—“Focus Within or On Others: The Impact of Reviewers’ Attentional Focus on Review Helpfulness,” published in Information Systems Research. The authors examine how, why, and when online reviews impact the consumer decision-making process, and whether the reviewer’s own experiences affect the perceived helpfulness of the content.

The researchers discovered that a slight shift in attentional focus—indicated using “invisible” personal pronouns like “I” versus “you”—could significantly influence the content’s perceived helpfulness. This suggests that the way reviewers frame their thoughts could affect how others engage with and benefit from their feedback. Reviews that shift the focus to a reader’s perspective (as in, “you will enjoy this product”) prove more helpful to the buyer.

“Product providers can identify the mixed-opinion reviews and proactively address negative opinions to reduce their potential impact on negative product impressions,” explained Lei. “In addition, review platforms may consider incorporating guidelines that encourage reviewers to focus on prospective consumers, using other-focused ‘invisible’ words to enhance review helpfulness.”

SUGGESTIONS FOR ONLINE STORES

Lei also recommends online retail stores be more strategic about displaying reviews on their websites.

“When product manufacturers and retailers deal with an increasing number of reviews, they should take a balanced view by considering the automatic influence of review exposure in addition to deliberation-related factors such as review quality,” she said.

In a related study, “Swayed by the Reviews: Disentangling the Effects of Average Ratings and Individual Reviews in Online Word-of-Mouth,” published in 2022 in Production and Operations Management, Lei and her co-authors found that individual reviews can easily sway consumers’ purchase decisions even if they contradict a product’s average rating.

“This indicates that consumers may not be as rational as previous literature assumed, as their final purchase decisions can be biased toward a few top-ranked reviews in an automatic manner,” said Lei.

BIAS TOWARD CERTAIN REVIEWS

The team also investigated consumers’ preferences for positive vs. negative reviews when searching for and evaluating reviews.

“We address a puzzle from earlier research: Negative reviews influence product sales more than positive reviews (a negativity bias), while positive reviews are generally considered more helpful (a positivity bias),” Lei said. “Through three experiments, we investigated consumers’ preferences for positive vs. negative reviews during the information-evaluation stages.”

Based on the experiments, Lei and her collaborators determined that consumers tend to seek negative reviews but that they also more favorably evaluate positive ones. This 2023 study, “Positive or Negative Reviews? Consumers’ Selective Exposure in Seeking and Evaluating Online Reviews,” was published in the Journal of the Association for Information Systems.

“Our findings provide a possible explanation for the well-documented negativity bias in product sales, suggesting that this negativity bias may result from negative reviews getting more exposure and being more persuasive through an automatic process, rather than being perceived as more helpful and diagnostic,” Lei said.

In her most recent paper, “Deliberative or Automatic: Disentangling the Dual Processes Behind the Persuasive Power of Online Word-of-Mouth,” forthcoming in MIS Quarterly, Lei and her colleagues explore the relative impact of deliberative processing versus automatic processing and further highlight the significant role of the automatic process in consumers’ use of online reviews.

Lorraine U. Martinelle ’97 is content manager in the UMass Amherst Isenberg School of Management’s Marketing and Communications office. Submit story ideas to lmartinelle@isenberg.umass.edu.