Dealing with Consumer Uncertainty: Online Consumer Reviews and What makes them helpful?

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Thesis Summary

I analyzed consumer reviews from IMDb and BestBuy in the context of Behavioral Economics and Information Economics specifically Loss Aversion, Negativity Bias and Search & Experience Goods Paradigm.

I found out that information sharing through consumer reviews is beneficial for potential buyers at least for Search Goods(Electronics). For Experience Goods(Movies) similar effect couldn't be observed.

Potential buyers find:

• Negatively and Positively rated reviews more helpful.
• Reviews with Negative sentiments more helpful.(Loss Aversion & Negativity Bias)
• Reviews with Positive sentiments less helpful.
• Moderately longer reviews more helpful.

Additionally when a review is negatively rated longer reviews are more helpful. Potential buyers may need more elaboration concerning why a certain good is bad. (Negative interaction effect between Review Rating and Review Length confirming Loss Aversion and Negativity Bias.)

Data Collection

• I scraped the data with Selenium Webdriver from BestBuy.com and IMDb.com.
• The scraper code can be found in this repository.

Research Methodology

• Tobit Regression was used to test the hypotheses.
• NRC Word-Emotion Association Lexicon was used to get negative and positive emotion words from consumer reviews.

Explanations of Files in the Repository

• All scripts which have EDA in them were part of the experimental phase of my thesis. All Data Cleaning and Data Wrangling processes were initially done within these files.
• Report.Rmd is the first research report concerning the research question that I sent to my thesis advisor. Initial and the lesser version of my thesis's statistical model was conducted in this report as well.
• Paper.Rmd includes both text and analysis code of the thesis.
• Paper.pdf is the rendered thesis.
• apa.csl configures the citation style.
• references.bib has all the references.
• custom.tex and non-float-fig.tex are the LaTeX configuration files that style my thesis into the appropriate format imposed by the Institute.