Research on the emotional content of customer reviews: a by- product of catharsis

Abstract

Electronic word-of-mouth, most commonly encountered in the form of online customer reviews, has received considerable attention of late by both academics and practitioners alike. An important antecedent for the generation of word-of-mouth is a strong emotional response, which in turn triggers the consumer to post a customer review online. This act of catharsis is held responsible for the existence of a bimodal or U-shaped distribution of customer reviews, where the extreme valences (positive and negative), receive many more reviews than the mid-range valences. However, no research to date has actually verified this to be true by analyzing the content of reviews for their emotional content. This paper fills the gap in the literature by conducting a detailed empirical study using customer reviews from Amazon.com. We find that, as expected, extreme valence reviews have more emotional content than mid-range valences. Furthermore, we find that search goods have very little emotional content, while experience goods have a higher emotional content in their reviews. The customer reviews for credence goods have a still higher level of emotional content.