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On the Spillover Effects of Online Product Reviews on Purchases: Evidence from Clickstream Data

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  • Young Kwark

    (Department of Information Systems and Operations Management, Warrington College of Business, University of Florida, Gainesville, Florida 32611)

  • Gene Moo Lee

    (Sauder School of Business, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, British Columbia V6T 1Z2, Canada)

  • Paul A. Pavlou

    (C. T. Bauer College of Business, University of Houston, Houston, Texas 77204)

  • Liangfei Qiu

    (Department of Information Systems and Operations Management, Warrington College of Business, University of Florida, Gainesville, Florida 32611)

Abstract

We study the spillover effects of the online reviews of other covisited products on the purchases of a focal product using clickstream data from a large retailer. The proposed spillover effects are moderated by (a) whether the related (covisited) products are complementary or substitutive, (b) the choice of media channel (mobile or personal computer (PC)) used, (c) whether the related products are from the same or a different brand, (d) consumer experience, and (e) the variance of the review ratings. To identify complementary and substitutive products, we develop supervised machine-learning models based on product characteristics, such as product category and brand, and novel text-based similarity measures. We train and validate the machine-learning models using product pair labels from Amazon Mechanical Turk. Our results show that the mean rating of substitutive (complementary) products has a negative (positive) effect on purchasing of the focal product. Interestingly, the magnitude of the spillover effects of the mean ratings of covisited (substitutive and complementary) products is significantly larger than the effects on the focal product, especially for complementary products. The spillover effect of ratings is stronger for consumers who use mobile devices versus PCs. We find the negative effect of the mean ratings of substitutive products across different brands on purchasing of a focal product to be significantly higher than within the same brand. Lastly, the effect of the mean ratings is stronger for less experienced consumers and for ratings with lower variance. We discuss implications on leveraging the spillover effect of the online product reviews of related products to encourage online purchases.

Suggested Citation

  • Young Kwark & Gene Moo Lee & Paul A. Pavlou & Liangfei Qiu, 2021. "On the Spillover Effects of Online Product Reviews on Purchases: Evidence from Clickstream Data," Information Systems Research, INFORMS, vol. 32(3), pages 895-913, September.
    • Handle: RePEc:inm:orisre:v:32:y:2021:i:3:p:895-913
    DOI: 10.1287/isre.2021.0998
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