Investigating the Effects of Dimension-Specific Sentiments on Product Sales: The Perspective of Sentiment Preferences

Abstract

While the literature has reached a consensus on the awareness effect of online word-of-mouth (eWOM), this paper studies its persuasive effect—specifically, dimension-specific sentiment effects on product sales.We examine the sentiment information in eWOM along different product dimensions and reveal different persuasive effects on consumers’ purchase decisions based on consumers’ sentiment preference, which is defined as the relative importance that consumers place on various dimension-specific sentiments. We use an aspect-level sentiment analysis to derive dimension-specific sentiment and PVAR (panel vector auto-regression) models, and estimate their effects on product sales using a movie panel dataset. The findings show that three dimension-specific sentiments (star, genre, and plot) are positively related to movie sales.Regarding consumers’ sentiment preferences, we find a positive relationship to movie sales that is stronger for plot sentiment, relative to star sentiment for low-budget movies. For high-budget movies, we find a positive relationship to movie sales that is stronger for star sentiment, relative to plot or genre sentiment.