Research on the Evolution of Consumers’ Purchase Intention Based on Online Reviews and Opinion Dynamics

Abstract

Due to the development of the e-commerce platform and the internet technology, the inclination of consumers for online shopping is shooting up. To lure consumers and gratify consumers, it’s necessary for enterprise to explore and excavate the purchase intention evolution mechanism so that enterprises can customize the marketing strategies and get consumers to purchase products. Previous studies have shown that consumers’ purchase intention is influenced significantly by online reviews. However, the mechanism by which consumers’ real purchase intentions change when they refer to online reviews is unclear. In fact, the process that consumers browse online reviews is truly an opinion interaction process between recipients (consumers who buy goods) and reviewers (consumers who post online reviews). Interaction between opinions may lead to changes in consumers’ purchase intentions. Therefore, an opinion dynamics model, the Deffuant–Weisbuch (D-W) model, is introduced and improved to explore the dynamic evolution of consumers’ purchase intention. Firstly, online reviews are executed. Then, fuzzy quantification of sentimental opinion values is performed through trapezoidal fuzzy numbers. Secondly, the improved D-W model is constructed considering the influence of the personality of recipients and the professionalism of reviewers on opinion interaction and the “negative bias” mechanism. Finally, a case study is constructed with online reviews of a cell phone by using the above method. In addition, sensitivity analyses are conducted for the personality coefficient of recipients, professionalism of reviewers, and size of heterogeneous consumers, respectively, through which, the validity of the proposed method is expounded. This study not only contributes to an in-depth discussion about the influencing factors of purchase intention, but also provides references for enterprises to better utilize online reviews to promote products and attract consumers.