Are Negative Reviews Always Helpful? Effects of Emotional Arousal on the Usefulness of Negative Reviews and How Merchants Should Respond

Abstract

In the rapidly evolving digital marketplace, understanding consumer behavior in response to negative reviews is of considerable practical and academic importance. Negative reviews influence consumer decision-making, but not all are accurate or helpful. Moreover, the interplay between emotional arousal and the perceived utility of negative reviews, particularly for high-risk purchases and costly products, remains largely unexplored. Addressing this gap, our study leverages attribution theory to scrutinize the curvilinear relationship between emotional arousal and the usefulness of negative reviews in high-risk purchases. We employed a robust mixed-methods design comprising three different studies aimed to triangulate further and understand these phenomena: Study 1 involved an objective content analysis of 6,147 negative reviews from prominent Chinese e-commerce platforms; Study 2 was a controlled scenario-based experiment with 99 consumers, aimed to test the underlying causal relationships; finally, Study 3 involved in-depth qualitative interviews and coding with 60 consumers. Our findings demonstrate an inverted U-shaped relationship between emotional arousal and the perceived utility of negative reviews in high-risk purchase scenarios. This relationship is mediated by prosocial motives, emphasizing that emotionally aroused consumers will likely find negative reviews helpful only up to a certain point, after which the utility diminishes. Notably, positive merchant responses serve as a crucial moderating variable in the emotional arousal-negative review usefulness relationship and the connection between prosocial motives and review usefulness. Our study advances the online review literature by offering nuanced insights into the complex relationship between emotional arousal and the utility of negative reviews in high-risk purchase scenarios. Our results have immediate implications for e-commerce platforms, enabling them to convert the challenge posed by negative reviews into actionable opportunities through informed response strategies.