An Empirical Study on Transactional Relationship in Electronic Word of Mouth

摘要

Marketers have shown intense interest in eWOM due to its effects on product sales (Chevalier & Mayzlin, 2006). But unlike traditional marketing communication like advertising, consumers rather than companies create eWOM. It is therefore important to understand how consumers create eWOM. Compared to eWOM's effects on sales, its causes are less understood (Berger, 2013). This research focuses on the following research questions. What types of products are senders more likely to talk about? What types of products do receivers want to hear more? How is eWOM message decided if sender and receiver have different needs? In traditional WOM, sender's message is influenced by receiver's need due to the communication between sender and receiver. The channel for eWOM--Internet poses a challenge for eWOM because the offline ways for a sender to learn about receiver's need are absent online. Incidentally, eWOM practitioners at Amazon have created a communication between receivers--helpful vote in the context of online customer review. If a receiver considers an Amazon customer review helpful, she can vote it as a helpful review. And the reviews with more helpful votes have more impact on other receivers and therefore sales (Chen, Dhanasobhon, & Smith, 2008; Jimenez & Mendoza, 2013; Pan & Zhang, 2011). On the other hand, helpful vote is visible to senders. In this paper we study whether Amazon senders are influenced by helpful votes from receivers.