View article

Customers increasingly rely on other consumers' reviews to make purchase decisions online. New insights into the customer review phenomenon can be derived from studying the semantic content and style properties of verbatim customer reviews to examine their influence on online retail sites' conversion rates. The authors employ text mining to extract changes in affective content and linguistic style properties of customer book reviews on Amazon.com. A dynamic panel data model reveals that the influence of positive affective content on conversion rates is asymmetrical, such that greater increases in positive affective content in customer reviews have a smaller effect on subsequent increases in conversion rate. No such tapering-off effect occurs for changes in negative affective content in reviews. Furthermore, positive changes in affective cues and increasing congruence with the product interest group's typical …