Impact of Online Consumer Reviews on Sales The Moderating.pdf

Impact of Online Consumer Reviews on Sales: The Moderating Role of Product and Consumer Characteristics Feng Zhu Assistant Professor Marshall School of Business University of Southern California Phone: 213-740-8469 Email: fzhu@ Xiaoquan (Michael) Zhang Assistant Professor HKUST Business School and MIT Center for Digital Business Phone: +852-2358-7644 Email: zhang@ust.hk April 21, 2009 We would like to thank the editor and two anonymous referees for their generous inputs into this manuscript that greatly improved its quality. We thank the NPD Group for providing the data used in the research. We also thank Hai Che, Chris Dellarocas, David Godes, Josh Lerner, John Little, Monic Sun, Chris Westland and seminar participants at London Business School for many insightful comments. All errors or omissions are our own. Both authors contributed equally to this work. Impact of Online Consumer Reviews on Sales: The Moderating Role of Product and Consumer Characteristics Abstract We examine how product and consumer characteristics moderate the influence of on- line consumer reviews on product sales using data from the video game industry. The findings indicate that online reviews are more influential for less popular games and games whose players have greater Internet exper