THEORIES OF REVIEWER-OBSERVER DYNAMICS IN ONLINE MULTIMODAL WORD-OF-MOUTH COMMUNICATION

Online reviews are central to consumer decision-making, yet communication between reviewers and observers remains imperfectly understood. While reviewers write for an audience, how their content is crafted versus how it is evaluated is less clear. This dissertation takes a holistic view of this reviewer–observer dynamic, examining how consumers create and interpret word of mouth (WOM) across visual and emotional forms of communication. The first essay, “How Consumers Photograph Products for Positive versus Negative Reviews,” examines how the valence of reviewers’ product experiences—positive or negative—affects the aesthetic effort they invest in crafting review photos. Aesthetic effort is defined here as the thought, time, and care reviewers devote to creating high-quality, well-composed images. Using a multi-method approach across seven studies—including field, experimental, and observational lab studies—this work demonstrates that consumers with positive (vs. negative) product experiences invest more aesthetic effort into photographing products, producing higher-quality images. Furthermore, these higher-quality images enhance the perceived helpfulness for observers by increasing fluency and signaling greater trustworthiness. This research sheds light on the creative processes behind review photo creation and the downstream consequences for consumer decision-making. The second essay, “If I’m Upset About a Fly in My Soup, Does Anyone Care? The Emotion Expression Bias in Online Communication,” identifies a parallel misalignment in textual WOM: reviewers systematically overestimate how strongly observers will feel the emotions expressed in their reviews. Across six preregistered studies using field data and controlled experiments, reviewers consistently overpredict observers’ emotional reactions across multiple emotions and contexts. This Emotion Expression Bias arises from divergent attributions— reviewers overestimate how much observers will attribute their expression of emotion to the situation and underestimate the extent to which observers will attribute their expression of emotion to the reviewer. As a result, emotional reviewers appear less credible and more overreactive than they expect, though this bias is mitigated when observers share the same experience.

Author dc:creator

• Xue, Jiani

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Melumad, Shiri

• Marketing

Language dc:language.iso

en

Repository record dc:identifier.uri

https://repository.upenn.edu/handle/20.500.14332/62329

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:repository.upenn.edu:20.500.14332/62329