Are Consumers More Likely to Contribute Online Reviews for Hit or Niche Products?
Are Consumers More Likely to Contribute Online Reviews for Hit or Niche Products?
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DOI：
10.2753/mis0742-1222270204
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发表时间：
2010-09-01
影响因子：
7.7
通讯作者：
Narayan, Ritu
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Dellarocas, Chrysanthos;Gao, Guodong (Gordon);Narayan, Ritu
用户生成的内容被一些人誉为一种民主化的力量，使消费者能够讨论以前被主流媒体忽视的利基产品。然而，消费者在多大程度上真正喜欢利用这些新的渠道来讨论不太知名的产品，而不是把大部分精力花在讨论广泛销售或已经成功的产品上，迄今为止仍然是一个悬而未决的问题。我们探讨这个问题，通过调查人口的倾向，以促进消费后的在线评论，为同一类别的不同产品（电影）涉及到这些产品的受欢迎程度的各种指标。我们发现，在其他条件不变的情况下，消费者更喜欢对市场上不太可用和不太成功的产品发表评论。然而，与此同时，他们也更有可能为许多其他人已经在网上评论过的产品贡献评论。这两种相反力量的存在导致了一个人口的平均倾向，审查电影消费后和电影的票房收入之间的U形关系：电影观众似乎更有可能贡献评论非常模糊的电影，但也非常高票房的电影。我们的研究结果表明，在线论坛设计者谁希望增加用户评论的贡献，为鲜为人知的产品，应使信息的数量以前发布的评论，一个不太突出的功能，他们的网站。
User-generated content has been hailed by some as a democratizing force that enables consumers to discuss niche products that were previously ignored by mainstream media. Nevertheless, the extent to which consumers truly prefer to use these new outlets to discuss lesser-known products as opposed to spending most of their energies on discussing widely marketed or already successful products has so far remained an open question. We explore this question by investigating how a population's propensity to contribute postconsumption online reviews for different products of the same category (motion pictures) relates to various indicators of those products' popularity. We discover that, ceteris paribus, consumers prefer to post reviews for products that are less available and less successful in the market. At the same time, however, they are also more likely to contribute reviews for products that many other people have already commented on online. The presence of these two opposite forces leads to a U-shaped relationship between a population's average propensity to review a movie postconsumption and that movie's box office revenues: moviegoers appear to be more likely to contribute reviews for very obscure movies but also for very high-grossing movies. Our findings suggest that online forum designers who wish to increase the contribution of user reviews for lesser-known products should make information about the volume of previously posted reviews a less-prominent feature of their sites.