Impact of Online Consumer Reviews on Sales: The Moderating Role of Product and Consumer Characteristics

Zhu, Feng; Zhang, Xiaoquan

doi:10.1509/jmkg.74.2.133

Cited by 987 publications

(540 citation statements)

References 84 publications

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“…First, the difference in quality performance for the same game on distinct platforms suggests additional costs of multihoming that managers might not fully anticipate when multihoming to different platforms. Since game quality is an important predictor of game sales (Zhu and Zhang 2010), when multihoming to a complex platform, managers may want to stagger the release and take more time to optimize and integrate the complement with the complex technology. Further, platform architecture can inform complement providers about the likely success of various multihoming strategies.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Platform Architecture and Quality Trade-offs of Multihoming Complements

Cennamo

Özalp

Kretschmer

2018

Information Systems Research

194

142

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Multihoming -the decision to design a complement to operate on multiple platforms -is becoming increasingly common in many platform markets. Perceived wisdom suggests that multihoming is beneficial for complement providers as they expand their market reach, but it reduces differentiation among competing platforms as the same complements become available on different platforms. We argue that complement providers face tradeoffs when designing their products for multiple platform architectures -they must decide how far to specialize the complement to each platform technological specifications. Because of these tradeoffs, multihoming complements can have different quality performance across platforms. In a study of the US video game industry, we find that multihoming games have lower quality performance on a technologically more complex console than on a less complex one. Also, games designed for and released on a focal platform have lower quality performance on platforms they are subsequently multihomed to. However, games that are released on the complex platform with a delay suffer a smaller drop in quality on complex platforms. This has important implications for platform competition, and for managers considering expanding their reach through multihoming. The logic is that multihoming offers potential additional revenues at limited costs for complementors, implicitly assuming that complements are the same on different platforms. But many platforms are not simple (two-sided) markets enabling transactions; they are also technology infrastructures whose features shape the development of third-party complementary products (Anderson et al. 2014;Gawer 2014, Tiwana et al.2010, Yoo et al. 2010. 2 Complements frequently must be tailored to a platform's core technological functions and interface specifications to take full advantage of its performance (Anderson et al. 2014, Claussen et al. 2015b, Tiwana 2015. In developing for multiple platforms, complementors must decide how far to specialize the complement to one platform (Schilling, 2000, Tiwana 2015, Yoo et al. 2010. We ask how the tradeoffs complementors face when designing products for multiple platforms affect the quality performance of multihoming complements across platforms. , Tiwana et al. 2010, Gawer 2014. As a system comprises the platform and its complements, the effect of platform architecture on both platform performance and complement supply matters for value creation at the system level (Cennamo 2016). the core technology components (e.g., processor cores), and the larger the number of specialized processors requiring a specific programming language for optimal utilization (i.e., no clean interface to handle the interdependencies), the more complex the platform. Complement developers must therefore choose to either use that language to optimally "conform" (Tiwana 2015) to the complex platform's specifications at the expense of integration and performance on other platforms, or to design the complement so it uses the lowest common denominator acr...

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Platform Architecture and Quality Trade-offs of Multihoming Complements

Cennamo

Özalp

Kretschmer

2018

Information Systems Research

194

142

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“…The long-tail phenomenon refers to the stylized fact that only a few mainstream products lie at the head of the demand curve, and the majority of the niche products spread out in the thick tail part, mainly due to the virtually unlimited shelf space of e-retailers [62]. In our case, the market leader, Apple, increased its market power from 2004 onward.…”

Section: Empirical Analysis 31 Industry Backgroundmentioning

confidence: 84%

“…Even though product life cycles are shorter than in the past, customers can wait a few days before making a purchase decision to observe early adopters' opinions and evaluations as posted on various sources, such as blogs, online product comparison sites, online shopping malls, and online forums [24]. As a result, online buzz has become more influential, and its effects on customer decision making have been actively studied in the past decade [18,32,52,62].…”

Section: E-sentiment Analysismentioning

confidence: 99%

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The role of online buzz for leader versus challenger brands: the case of the MP3 player market

Shin

Hanssens

Kim

2016

Electron Commer Res

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“…Large portions of these opinions are product reviews about "experienced goods"-products or services of which characteristics are difficult to observe in advance but can be learned after purchase [21]. Not only do product reviews provide great value to individual consumers and influence their purchasing decisions [24], but they also impact the product or service strategies of businesses [32]. However, gaining insights becomes increasingly challenging for users as the number of reviews gets larger and larger [7,12,13,31].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

OpinionBlocks: A Crowd-Powered, Self-improving Interactive Visual Analytic System for Understanding Opinion Text

Yang

Zhou

et al. 2013

Lecture Notes in Computer Science

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Abstract. Millions of people rely on online opinions to make their decisions. To better help people glean insights from massive amounts of opinions, we present the design, implementation, and evaluation of OpinionBlocks, a novel interactive visual text analytic system. Our system offers two unique features. First, it automatically creates a fine-grained, aspect-based visual summary of opinions, which provides users with insights at multiple levels. Second, it solicits and supports user interactions to rectify text-analytic errors, which helps improve the overall system quality. Through two crowd-sourced studies on Amazon Mechanical Turk involving 101 users, OpinionBlocks demonstrates its effectiveness in helping users perform real-world opinion analysis tasks. Moreover, our studies show that the crowd is willing to correct analytic errors, and the corrections help improve user task completion time significantly. Keywords: Text analytics; text visualization; self-improving; crowd-sourcing Figure 1. The interface of OpinionBlocks: (a) a system-generated aspect-based summary; (b) a system-extracted review snippet; (c) the full text of a review.

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Impact of Online Consumer Reviews on Sales: The Moderating Role of Product and Consumer Characteristics

Cited by 987 publications

References 84 publications

Platform Architecture and Quality Trade-offs of Multihoming Complements

Platform Architecture and Quality Trade-offs of Multihoming Complements

The role of online buzz for leader versus challenger brands: the case of the MP3 player market

OpinionBlocks: A Crowd-Powered, Self-improving Interactive Visual Analytic System for Understanding Opinion Text

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