Three essays on online word-of-mouth and user behavior in online environments

Online word-of-mouth (WOM) plays a vital role in shaping consumer behavior and firm performance in digital environments. While prior research has made substantial progress in understanding the influence of online reviews and textual content, important gaps remain regarding the role of visual content, emotional ambiguity, and manipulated expectations. This dissertation addresses these gaps through three essays that explore emerging psychological and behavioral mechanisms in online WOM using large-scale social media and review platform data. The first essay examines how emotions conveyed through images affect user engagement on social media. By combining vision-language models with causal inference techniques, it reveals that certain discrete emotions, such as anger and surprise, significantly boost engagement, while joy has no discernible effect. The second essay introduces emotional ambiguity, uncertainty in emotional valence, as a novel factor influencing engagement. It shows that ambiguous content, which prompts deeper cognitive processing, can be more engaging, especially in influencer contexts. The third essay investigates how fake reviews distort consumer expectations, leading to non-linear satisfaction outcomes. It finds that consumers with higher cognitive engagement are more resilient to manipulated expectations. Collectively, these essays advance the literature on online WOM by integrating affective computing, causal modeling, and drawing on psychological theories. They provide both theoretical and practical insights into how emotional and cognitive responses to content shape user behavior in online environments.

Name thesis:degree_name

Doctor of Philosophy

Level thesis:degree_level

dissertation

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Management

Department dc:contributor.department

Department of Information Systems and Business Analytics

Grantor

Iowa State University

Year dc:date.issued

2025

Author dc:creator

• Salehi, Masoud

Advisors dc:contributor.advisor

• Zhang, Zhu
• Zhang, Wenli
• Dennis, Alexander
• Park, Young Woong
• Dickerson, Julie

Language dc:language.iso

en

DOI

https://doi.org/10.31274/td-20251215-285

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dr.lib.iastate.edu:20.500.12876/jrl8BZZr