Assessing the product review helpfulness: Affective-Cognitive evaluation and the moderating effect of feedback mechanism

Product review length has been demonstrated as one of the key factors that influence the product review helpfulness. However, we have little knowledge of a deeper understanding on how consumers process the product review length to assess product review helpfulness. Anchoring on the human's affective-cognitive model of decision-making and the prominent coping approaches, this research revisits this key issue from consumers’ affect-oriented and cognition-oriented processing perspective. Our findings show that (1) consumers apply both the affect-oriented and cognition-oriented processing to assess the helpfulness of product review, (2) a significant inverted U-shape relationship between the review length and the review helpfulness, and interestingly, (3) such a relationship is further moderated by whether the product review author has provided a response to consumers’ comments. These findings not only provide further robust evidence to the consideration of both product review length and feedback, but also suggest a refinement of the underlying mechanism on how consumers process product review length to assess product review helpfulness.