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

摘要

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.