DiSCourse Seminar with Alexander Kupfer
04 November 2022, 12:00 (CET), hybrid
Digital Science Center, Innrain 15, 1st floor, Open Space Area or Big Blue Button
DiSCourse - The Digital Science Seminar Series on
“What A Great Deal” – Why Decomposing Textual Aspects of Online Customer Reviews Can Be Useful
Online customer reviews (OCRs) are omnipresent in e-commerce as they help to reduce information asymmetries about product quality. Consumers substantially rely on OCRs before purchasing but are likely to face an information overload due to the high number of existing OCRs. To decide which OCRs to highlight, e-commerce companies typically let consumers vote whether a review is helpful and then sort OCRs by their helpfulness votes. Even though this approach has shortcomings, existing research uses these votes to infer the determinants of what makes a review helpful. In this talk, I will present an alternative approach to infer review helpfulness. I will illustrate how text mining approaches can decompose textual aspects of OCRs (e.g., information on purchase condition, product quality, and seller). To examine whether the composition of textual aspects is meaningful, I compare OCR data from ‘Black Friday purchases’ with OCR data from regular purchases. Information about the composition of textual aspects in OCRs further allows learning about consumers’ perceived helpfulness for each OCR.
Alexander Kupfer, University of Innsbruck, DiSC and Department of Information Systems, Production and Logistics Management
Alexander Kupfer is an assistant professor at the University of Innsbruck and affiliated with both the Department of Information Systems, Production and Logistics Management and the Digital Science Center (DiSC). His academic work centres on information in digital business and digital markets, particularly on the effects of rewards and design aspects on online review systems.