Three Essays on the Role of Information in Online Consumer Reviews

This dissertation proposal is comprised of 3 essays. The first two essays investigate how different informational elements of online reviews, including their textual portion, impact their perceived helpfulness of this form of electronic Word-of-Mouth. The third essay is intended to improve the process by which reviews are classified in regards to their information content, which can be employed for Marketing Intelligence purposes and to develop better means to overcome information overload in online settings. These three essays utilize, as part of their methodology, a natural language processing method called Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA), which allows for the automatic analysis of large amounts of text with minimal human intervention. This tool may allow academics and marketers not only to analyze large amounts of data, but also to rule out potential bias resulting from the employment of human coders or raters.

Many thanks to Jorge’s Committee: Chairs: Chair: Dr. David Gefen, Drexel University Co-Chair: Dr. Rolph E. Anderson, Drexel University

Committee Members: Dr. Trina Andras, Drexel University Dr. Michaela Draganska, Drexel University Dr. George Knox, Tilburg University Dr. Kai R. Larsen, U. Colorado Boulder