Do Market Differences Influence Online Consumer's Behavior? An Investigation of Online Movie Reviews Usefulness Across Markets

This paper aims to investigate how does market differences influence consumers' behavior when reading online reviews. To this end, we propose a conceptual model from the perspective of content quality and source quality to explore the determinants of review helpfulness. We unravel that consumers' rating behaviors show differences in different movie markets. Using reviews data from IMDB.com and douban.com, we apply linear models to examine the cultural differences. The results demonstrate that there are significant differences across two different movie markets (China and US). Specifically, online reviews length, review extremity, reviewer centrality and reviewer experience have signal positive impact on usefulness of movie reviews. We found that long sentences and extreme sensibility can be more persuasive in individualist societies (US) than collectivist societies (China); while the effects of reviewer centrality and reviewer experience to review usefulness are inclined to be same in two markets. The findings give a better understanding of online reviewer behaviors across different markets and provide important insights into emerging movie markets such as China.