Analyzing Online Customer Reviews - An Interdisciplinary Literature Review And Research Agenda

A systematic and interdisciplinary literature review to examine how online customer review data is used in academic research and which insights these studies provide finds that the most studies investigate online customer reviews’ effect on sales, review helpfulness or review manipulation are unsuccessful.

Abstract

Online customer reviews increasingly exert influence on customers’ purchase decisions when shopping online and give new importance to the concept of word-of-mouth. This is reflected in a growing body of academic literature across varying disciplines that draws on online customer reviews as source of information. However, these studies apply varying methods and obtain contradicting results. We conduct a systematic and interdisciplinary literature review to examine how online customer review data is used in academic research and which insights these studies provide. Analyzing 49 journal articles we find that the most studies investigate online customer reviews’ effect on sales, review helpfulness or review manipulation. Furthermore, the variety of product categories and review websites these studies receive their information from is rather limited. The results reveal that previous research can only provide an imperfect understanding of the impact of electronic wordof-mouth on business. We therefore develop a twofold research agenda with regards to (a) studies investigating customer reviews and its effects and (b) issues with respect to the use of customer reviews as a data source in academic research.