DOI: 10.36347/sjebm.2020.v07i01.001

Pages: 1-9

Previous studies did not discuss extremely positive and extremely negative reviews separately, which leads to inconsistent conclusions regarding the role of review extremity in predicting review helpfulness. Meanwhile, the direct relationship between review extremity and review helpfulness has been extensively explored in literature, but few studies on the moderating effect are available to reveal the boundary conditions of this effect. Therefore, this study focuses on the impact of extremity of negative reviews on the helpfulness of reviews and further explores the moderating role of review characteristics and product type. 86,930 negative reviews of hotels from Ctrip.com were used to perform Negative binomial regression to test our research model. Our findings reveal that for negative reviews, review extremity has a significant positive impact on review helpfulness, and the impact is much stronger when negative reviews are associated with lower hotel star level, photos and longer length. This study enriches the theoretical research of online review helpfulness and provides some managerial suggestions for online platforms and enterprise managers.