No abstract

While some online reviews explicitly praise or criticize a product, others reveal a neutral evaluation. We predicted that extreme reviews would be considered more useful than moderate ones, and that negative reviews would be considered more useful than positive ones. To test these predictions, this study collected a dataset comprising 951,178 reviews of New York restaurants made by 142,286 reviewers on Yelp.com. By combining these two datasets, we incorporated each reviewer’s unique reference point into a model and showed that extremely positive or negative reviews were considered more useful than moderate ones and that negative reviews were considered more useful than positive ones. This dominance of negative over positive reviews was also more pronounced in the conditions of larger variance and lower average ratings for restaurants. Overall, these results support the presence and influence of extremity and negativity biases, particularly in the context of high preference heterogeneity.

We examined the effectiveness of corporate social responsibility (CSR) communication by multinational corporations in terms of the type of message being delivered. Results of Study 1 (N = 122 Korean adults) showed that CSR messages received more positive responses from consumers when temporal distance was low, compared to when it was high. Moreover, emotional message appeals generated more positive product evaluations from consumers than did rational message appeals when framed in the near versus distant future. Results of Study 2 (N = 120 Korean adults) revealed that Korean consumers reacted more positively to CSR messages from domestic companies than to those from multinational corporations when such messages were described concretely versus abstractly. Across the 2 studies, we found that construal levels and message appeals shaped the behavioral processes that generate consumers' responses to CSR messages from multinational corporations.