Multinational observational analysis reveals variations in customer review valence and helpfulness across Amazon retail platforms, highlighting cross-cultural response biases in global ecommerce.
As multinational firms continue to sell global brands across country borders online, online review platforms create value for consumers and for firms, yet differences in language and reviewing style call into question the comparability of review content across countries. Building on past research on country differences and online word-of-mouth, we examine the effect of language and country on the volume, valence, and helpfulness of customer reviews. An analysis of 32,555 reviews across five country sites of Amazon.com challenges previous assumptions about verbosity differences between countries. We also find evidence of response biases that affect star rating valence and the helpfulness of reviews. Lastly, we demonstrate and explain how using a multinational dataset to replicate a previously published, single-country study can yield new insights into consumer reviewing behavior.
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Barbro et al. (2019) studied this question.
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