Review Helpfulness Scores vs. Review Unhelpfulness Scores: Two Sides of the Same Coin or Different Coins?

TL;DR

This study investigates whether review unhelpfulness scores are driven by review quality or user behavior, finding they are largely influenced by user voting patterns rather than intrinsic review features.

Contribution

It challenges the assumption that unhelpfulness scores reflect review quality, showing they are mainly affected by user behavior and not review characteristics.

Findings

Unhelpfulness scores are not significantly driven by review features.

Users who vote unhelpful are more likely to do so for other reviews.

Unhelpfulness voters engage less with the platform.

Abstract

Evaluating the helpfulness of online reviews supports consumers who must sift through large volumes of online reviews. Online review platforms have increasingly adopted review evaluating systems, which let users evaluate whether reviews are helpful or not; in turn, these evaluations assist review readers and encourage review contributors. Although review helpfulness scores have been studied extensively in the literature, our knowledge regarding their counterpart, review unhelpfulness scores, is lacking. Addressing this gap in the literature is important because researchers and practitioners have assumed that unhelpfulness scores are driven by intrinsic review characteristics and that such scores are associated with low-quality reviews. This study validates this conventional wisdom by examining factors that influence unhelpfulness scores. We find that, unlike review helpfulness scores, unhelpfulness scores are generally not driven by intrinsic review characteristics, as almost none of them are statistically significant predictors of an unhelpfulness score. We also find that users who receive review unhelpfulness votes are more likely to cast unhelpfulness votes for other reviews. Finally, unhelpfulness voters engage much less with the platform than helpfulness voters do. In summary, our findings suggest that review unhelpfulness scores are not driven by intrinsic review characteristics. Therefore, helpfulness and unhelpfulness scores should not be considered as two sides of the same coin.