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The Impact of Readability on the Usefulness of Online Product Reviews: A Case Study on an Online Bookstore

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 5288))

Abstract

Online product reviews is an important advantage for consumers of experience goods in online marketplaces and act as a useful source of information during the purchase of a good. Furthermore in some online marketplaces consumers have the opportunity to evaluate how helpful a review was by using a binary evaluation interface provided by the online marketplace. This results to the usefulness score of a review which is calculated as a fraction of helpful votes over the total votes that this review has received. Our early results indicate that the usefulness score of a particular review is affected in a significant way by the qualitative characteristics of the review as measured by readability tests applied to a large dataset of reviews collected from the UK section of the popular online marketplace Amazon.

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Miltiadis D. Lytras John M. Carroll Ernesto Damiani Robert D. Tennyson

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© 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Korfiatis, N., Rodríguez, D., Sicilia, MA. (2008). The Impact of Readability on the Usefulness of Online Product Reviews: A Case Study on an Online Bookstore. In: Lytras, M.D., Carroll, J.M., Damiani, E., Tennyson, R.D. (eds) Emerging Technologies and Information Systems for the Knowledge Society. WSKS 2008. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 5288. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-87781-3_46

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-87781-3_46

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-87780-6

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-87781-3

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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