Culture difference and the impact on online review helpfulness: From the analytic and holistic cognitive processing perspective

Consumers with different national culture backgrounds heavily depend upon product review to make the shopping decisions, and thus product review helpfulness significantly influences the business performance in the e-commerce context. However, prior literature neglected the heterogeneity of different national cultures, which could cause a shift in consumers' perception towards the review helpfulness. To fill the research gap, this paper builds upon a cultural induced cognitive processing theoretical framework, the Nisbett's analytic and holistic cognitive processing style framework, and proposes that consumers from East Asian countries and Western countries possess different cognitive processing style, thus relying on different product review features to assess product review helpfulness. Our conception is supported by an analytical investigation of a unique dataset from a major B2C shopping website in Western countries and its similar twin website in East Asian countries. Implications for researchers and practitioners are provided at the end of this paper.