Understanding of Customer Decision-Making Behaviors Depending on Online Reviews

With a never-ending stream of reviews propagating online, consumers encounter countless good and bad reviews. Depending on which reviews consumers read, they get a different impression of the product. In this paper, we focused on the relationship between the text and numerical information of reviews to gain a better understanding of the decision-making process of consumers affected by the reviews. We evaluated the decisions that consumers made when encountering the review structure of star ratings paired with comments, with respect to three research questions: (1) how consumers compare two products with reviews, (2) how they individually perceive a product based on the corresponding reviews, and (3) how they interpret star ratings and comments. Through the user study, we confirmed that consumers consider reviews differently according to product presentation conditions. When consumers were comparing products, they were more influenced by star ratings, whereas when they were evaluating individual products, they were more influenced by comments. Additionally, consumers planning to buy a product examined star ratings by more stringent criteria than those who had already purchased the product.