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1. Introduction
Information asymmetry is an inevitable issue in the e-commerce environment because customers cannot physically evaluate the quality of products (Mavlanova et al., 2012). E-sellers have introduced online customer reviews, namely, product evaluations provided by other customers, to provide additional information to customers for overcoming the above-mentioned deficiency (Mudambi and Schuff, 2010). According to eMarketer, over half of respondents used online reviews consistently to inform their purchase decisions and only 11 percent of respondents rarely used online reviews for purchase decisions in 2017 (TeMarketer, 2017).
Signaling theory has been used to identify and comprehend the cues (i.e. signals) that customers use to assess product quality in the face of information asymmetry (Wells et al., 2011). Online customer reviews are considered an efficient way to reduce information asymmetry, and their characteristics have been regarded in prior studies as signals reflecting product quality (Berger et al., 2010). Perceived product quality reflecting the customers’ subjective evaluation is important for making purchase decisions in an e-commerce environment, where the actual product quality is difficult to assess (Gatti et al., 2012). However, the majority of existing studies assess only the direct impact of online customer reviews on purchase decisions (Cheung et al., 2014), and only a few studies consider the mediating effect of perceived product quality on purchase decisions. In particular, existing studies focus on the quantitative aspects of online reviews, such as rating and volume (Sun, 2012). However, the textual content of online reviews is considered to be an important determinant of customer choices, which exceeds the valence (Archak et al., 2011). The textual content of online reviews can be divided into two types depending on the nature of the description of the object: “emotional content,” which denotes emotional states and feelings of the reviewer (e.g. this product makes me feel happy); “rational content,” which includes subjective evaluations and objective descriptions of a product (e.g. this product is good) (Kotler and Gary, 2010; Peng et al., 2014). According to signaling theory, extrinsic cues not inherent to a product are more influential than intrinsic cues that represent product-related attributes (Wells et al., 2011). Therefore, in this study, we focused on the impact of quality-extrinsic cues (i.e. emotional content) on customers’ perceived...