Customer perception of the deceptiveness of online product reviews: A speech act theory perspective

摘要

With the presence of fake reviews on e-commerce platforms, the reliability of reviews becomes questionable. The extant literature demonstrates the impact of fake reviews on product sales and proposes several algorithms to prevent fake reviews from being displayed on the platform. However, what has largely remained uninvestigated is how customers perceive reviews present on the e-commerce platform. Based on the speech act theory, we develop a theoretical framework that explains how the linguistic style (both at the word and the structural level) acts as a cue for assessing a reviewer's (in)sincere intentions. We evaluate the framework on a corpus of 120 online product reviews - each examined by at least 50 customers - using the fractional logit model. Results suggest that the communication style of a speaker reflects his/her intention. Reviews with less contextual embedding, argument structuring, and flattering through non-verbal cues trigger customers towards perceiving a review as deceptive.