How Does the Review Tag Function Benefit Highly-Rated Popular Products in Online Markets?

Abstract

Since online reviews have become an increasingly important information source for consumers to evaluate products during online shopping, many platforms started to adopt review mechanisms to maximize the value of such massive reviews. In recent years, the review tag function has been adopted in practices and leading the research of sentiment and opinion extraction techniques. However, the examination of its impact has been largely overlooked. In this paper, we specifically look into the effect of the tag function on the evaluation of highly-rated popular products and helpfulness perception of their reviews by proposing a framework through the lens of attribution theory. Experimental methods were utilized to test our hypotheses. Our findings demonstrate the importance of tag function application as it further increases consumers’ product evaluation for popular products. We also found that different tag function appearances influence consumers’ cognitive biases in review helpfulness perception.