EXPRESS: Displaying the Amount of Consumption Time in Online Reviews Can Affect Helpful Votes

Some review platforms display how long reviewers used a product alongside their review. The authors investigate whether doing so translates to more helpful reviews. Using online reviews of video games from a video game platform and leveraging its unique playtime tracking feature, they find the relationship between the amount of time playing a game before posting a review and the number of helpful votes the review receives follows a u-shape, where shorter and longer playtimes correspond to more votes, while intermediate times correspond to fewer votes. How displayed consumption time affects consumer expectations potentially explains this relationship. The less time reviewers spend consuming a product, the lower others’ expectations of review helpfulness may be and hence the more lenient their judgements. More consumption time may increase these expectations, but extensive consumption time could overcome this higher bar by signaling credibility. Moderation results related to reviewer experience signaling and review or product characteristics, as well as mediation results involving consumer-gifted review awards help support this context-based expectations account. These results are robust to conditioning out review, reviewer, and game level factors, sample matching, and other settings. The findings have implications for reducing the asymmetric information problem, managing expectations, and optimizing reviews.