Online Reviews and the Information Overload: The Role of Selective, Parsimonious and Concordant Top Reviews

By empowering customers to make fitting purchases, user reviews play an important role in reducing inefficiencies in the provisioning of product information. Because of the abundance of reviews and the signals they provide, this information may become confusing and risks overloading customers. Consequently, review hosting platforms have adjusted their designs to feature a signal “distilled” from a selective set of “top reviews” and their valences. The expected ease with which customers process this signal is intended to increase their satisfaction, thus reducing dispersion in their subsequent review ratings. In this study, we analyze the influential role that top reviews and their valence play under various scenarios: when customers are overloaded by a large number of reviews, when top reviews themselves are not parsimonious in number, and when the signals from top reviews are not in concordance with that from all the other reviews. We find that the valence of top reviews plays a central role in mitigating information overload. However, the influence of those top reviews diminishes when they too pose an overload risk but is strengthened when their signal is reaffirmed by signals from all other reviews. Finally, the impact of top reviews is weaker for less popular products.

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Work Title Online Reviews and the Information Overload: The Role of Selective, Parsimonious and Concordant Top Reviews
Access
Open Access
Creators
  1. Wael Jabr
  2. Mohammad Saifur Rahman
Keyword
  1. Information overload
  2. Top reviews
  3. Signaling theory
  4. Information theory
  5. Information provisioning
License In Copyright (Rights Reserved)
Work Type Article
Publisher
  1. MIS Quarterly
Publication Date August 29, 2022
Publisher Identifier (DOI)
  1. https://doi.org/10.25300/MISQ/2022/16169
Deposited July 29, 2022

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Version 1
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  • Created
  • Added Jabr_Rahman_MISQ_Online_Reviews_and_Information_Overload.pdf
  • Added Creator Wael Jabr
  • Added Creator Mohammad Saifur Rahman
  • Published
  • Updated Keyword, Publication Date Show Changes
    Keyword
    • Information overload, Top reviews, Signaling theory, Information theory, Information provisioning
    Publication Date
    • 2022-09-01
    • 2022-08-29
  • Updated