PurposeWith the increasing importance of e-commerce to the economy and people's lives, user-generated content, such as electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM) represented by online reviews, has exploded. On one hand, it is of great significance for review consumers (readers) to identify high-quality ones from a large number of existing reviews to assist their purchase decision. On the other hand, how to use appropriate strategies to make their published reviews more concerned by others is also important to review generators (reviewers). The purpose of this study is to understand the comprehensive relationship among review characteristics, review helpfulness and receiver attention.Design/methodology/approachThis study uses the online movie reviews obtained from the most popular review platform in China to conduct multiple empirical analyses.FindingsThe results show that the review helpfulness plays a mediating role between the emotional characteristics of online reviews and the receiver attention, and such a mediating role is more significant among reviewers with rich review expertise. The reviewer's expertise also moderates the impact of review emotions on review helpfulness.Originality/valueThis work studies eWOM receiver involvement, which can ultimately impact product sales, but seldom be investigated in eWOM domain. Therefore, this research can enrich studies on eWOM and provide valuable practical implications as well.

PurposeThere are two major strategies for short video advertising which are KOL (key opinion leader) endorsement and in-feed advertising. The authors aim to research the effectiveness of these two strategies for heterogeneous sellers.Design/methodology/approachThe study employed a data set of users from Douyin. Using an endogenous treatment model, the study empirically examines the two strategies' effectiveness in attracting product traffic for online retailors at a short video app Douyin (TikTok).FindingsThe results show that the performance of in-feed advertising is higher when the seller's product is of lower price and when the seller has smaller cumulative video exposure. In addition, KOL endorsement is effective regardless of the product price, but performs better when the seller has larger cumulative video exposure.Originality/valueTo the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is one of the first to explore the interaction effects of two major advertising strategies, KOL endorsement and in-feed advertising on short video platforms. The findings provide important theoretical contributions and practical implications.

PurposeBuilding on a small body of work, the authors' study aims to investigate some important antecedents of online review characteristics in the Chinese restaurant industry.Design/methodology/approachUsing a data set of restaurant reviews collected from a most popular review platform in China, the authors conduct a series of analyses to examine the influence of travel experience and travel distance on travelers' review characteristics in terms of review rating and media richness. The moderating effect of restaurant price on the influence is also investigated.FindingsTravelers with a longer travel distance and more travel experience tend to provide higher and lower online ratings, respectively, which can be explained by the construal level theory (CLT) and the expectation-confirmation theory (ECT), respectively. Furthermore, these strong feelings can then induce travelers to post enriched reviews with more pictures, more words and more affective words to release consumption tension. Besides, restaurant price can moderate these relationships.Originality/valueDistinguished from most studies which mainly focus on the consequences of online review characteristics or antecedents of review helpfulness, the authors pay attention to the effects of travelers' individual differences in terms of travel distance and travel experience on travelers' online reviewing behavior. In addition to review rating, the authors also focus on media richness in terms of visual and textual information. The authors' research findings can benefit restaurant consumers and managers for their online word-of-mouth utilization and management.

Existing studies have found that online search is a revealed measure for investor attention and a useful predictor of stock returns. We study the heterogeneity in retail investor attention by comparing search conducted on weekdays vs. weekends and investigate the price pressure channel and information processing channel for stock return predictability. According to the information processing channel, weekends afford retail investors more time for the intensive cognitive analysis necessary to make better predictions. Alternatively, weekend search might better capture the price pressure from retail investors’ trading activities. We provide empirical results that support the information processing channel. We first show that weekend search, rather than weekday search, predicts large-cap stock returns in both the cross-section and time series. Additionally, our findings on retail trading activity contradict the price pressure channel in that weekday search, rather than weekend search, leads to a subsequent retail order imbalance. Overall, our study contributes to the literature on the predictive power of online search on stock returns, which has mainly focused on the price pressure channel, which yields significant results for small-cap stocks only.