Evaluating Content Quality and Usefulness of Online Product Reviews

Abstract

Online product reviews are an important resource for consumers in online marketplaces because they provide a useful source of support information during the purchase of goods. Furthermore, in some online marketplaces consumers have the opportunity to evaluate the usefulness of a review by using a binary evaluation interface provided by the online marketplace. These evaluations produce a usefulness score, which is calculated as a fraction of helpful votes out of the total votes that a review has received. The results of these evaluations indicate that the usefulness score of a particular review is significantly affected by the qualitative characteristics of the review as measured by readability tests applied to a large dataset of reviews collected from the United Kingdom section of the popular online marketplace Amazon.