earticle

영어

The proliferation of online customer reviews has completely changed how consumers purchase. Consumers now heavily depend on authentic experiences shared by previous customers. However, deceptive reviews that aim to manipulate customer decision-making to promote or defame a product or service pose a risk to businesses and buyers. The studies investigating consumer perception of deceptive reviews found that one of the important cues is based on review content. This study aims to investigate the impact of the information amount of review on the review truthfulness. This study adopted the Information Manipulation Theory (IMT) as an overarching theory, which asserts that the violations of one or more of the Gricean maxim are deceptive behaviors. It is regarded as a quantity violation if the required information amount is not delivered or more information is delivered; that is an attempt at deception. A topic modeling algorithm is implemented to reveal the distribution of each topic embedded in a text. This study measures information amount as topic diversity based on the results of topic modeling, and topic diversity shows how heterogeneous a text review is. Two datasets of restaurant reviews on Yelp.com, which have Filtered (deceptive) and Unfiltered (genuine) reviews, were used to test the hypotheses. Reviews that contain more diverse topics tend to be truthful. However, excessive topic diversity produces an inverted U-shaped relationship with truthfulness. Moreover, we find an interaction effect between topic diversity and reviews’ ratings. This result suggests that the impact of topic diversity is strengthened when deceptive reviews have lower ratings. This study contributes to the existing literature on IMT by building the connection between topic diversity in a review and its truthfulness. In addition, the empirical results show that topic diversity is a reliable measure for gauging information amount of reviews.