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1. Introduction
Online consumer reviews, a form of user-generated content, draw particular attention because of their effect on the purchasing decisions of consumers (Lin et al., 2017). When purchasing products or using services from an online website, consumers often find it difficult to make purchase decisions based only on information provided by vendors due to their being suspicious of the vendors’ bias in portraying their products/services in a more favorable position than deserved (López-López and Parra, 2016). Therefore, they look for other consumers’ reviews, which are subjective and based upon their own experiences/opinions (Eslami and Ghasemaghaei, 2017; Lee et al., 2016). This consumer-generated information provides indirect pre-consumption experiences of a particular product or service by other consumers, and is thus helpful in making purchasing decisions in online environments (Baek et al., 2012; Cheung et al., 2008; Park and Lee, 2009).
Studies have indicated the importance of capturing the sentiments expressed in online consumer reviews (Salehan and Kim, 2016; Kato et al., 2008; Gayo-Avello et al., 2013; Liu et al., 2012). Sentiments expressed through user-generated content provide explanations of consumers’ attitudes about a product or service (Hu et al., 2014). Sentiments could be framed as neutral, negative, or positive statements with varying degrees of emotions (e.g. joy, anger, sadness), which provide rich information both for consumers in making purchasing decisions, and for companies in exploring consumers’ attitudes about their products and services.
Based on cue-summation theory (Severin, 1967), consumers could increase their knowledge about a product/service by finding multiple cues of information regarding that product/service. Previous research has found that consumers’ review ratings are considered very helpful by other consumers in making purchasing decisions (Lee et al., 2013; Salehan and Kim, 2016). These ratings reflect the positive, neutral, or negative evaluation of the quality of a product or service by the review writer (Mudambi and Schuff, 2010). As review ratings are the overall judgment of writers about the quality of a product or service, based on congruity theory, which argues that people prefer to have consistency between their thoughts and actions (Osgood and Tannenbaum, 1955), it is expected that reviews’ sentiment will tend to match with reviewers’ assigned ratings. Moreover, since according to social sharing of emotions...