SIS Research Area - Information Systems & Management (IS&M)

Summary of SIS PhD Graduate Dr. KOH Noi Sian’s work

Online review information will only be valuable if they are interpreted correctly. In one study, we investigate if societal norms have influence on posting behavior and if the reported average of online ratings matches the perceived average assessment of the population as a whole. We find that consumers’ rating behaviors are affected by cultural influences and that they are influenced in predictable ways. In addition, we find that online reviews are subjected to under-reporting bias, which is, consumers with extreme opinions are more likely to report their opinions than consumers with moderate reviews causing online reviews to be a biased estimator of a product’s true quality. The degree of under-reporting bias however, varies across cultures. Users should therefore exercise care in interpreting the information from online reviews.

Next, text information will only be valuable when they can be analyzed empirically. The ability of users to create and publish content has provided a vast amount of user-generated content such as online reviews, blogs, twitter messages etc. However, the amount of text messages is overwhelmingly large and unstructured, making information difficult to quantify. This creates challenge in understanding the value of information in user-generated content. Leveraging upon sentiment mining and authorship attribution techniques which are scalable for large scale datasets, studies were conducted to understand the economic value of user-generated information and the impact of fraudulent reviews on product sales. Future studies will involve state-of-the-art technologies and analytics to advance our understanding on the inter-relationship between ratings, sentiments and sales as well as to shed insight on the relevance of ratings and sentiments over a sequential decision making process.

Journal Publications (Refereed):

• Noi Sian KOH, Nan HU, Eric K CLEMONS. Do Online Reviews Reflect a Product's True Perceived Quality? - An Investigation of Online Movie Reviews across Cultures, Journal of Electronic Commerce Research and Applications, 2010, 9, 5, pp.374-385 . (Funded in part by Wharton - SMU Research Centre.)
• Nan HU, Indranil BOSE, Noi Sian KOH, Ling LIU. Manipulations of Online Reviews: An analysis of ratings, readability and sentiments. Forthcoming in Decision Support Systems.