Words Meet Photos: When and Why Photos Increase Review Helpfulness

Are reviews with photos more helpful? If so, do consumers find reviews more helpful when photos and text convey similar or different information? This article examines the effect of content similarity between photos and text on review helpfulness and its underlying mechanism. Using a data set of 7.4 million reviews associated with 3.5 million photos from Yelp, and applying machine learning algorithms, the authors quantify the similarity of the content between text and photos. They find that, overall, photos increase the helpfulness of a review. More importantly, though, greater similarity between photos and text heightens review helpfulness more. The authors then validate algorithm-based similarity assessments with similarity perceptions of human judges. Using real-world reviews from Yelp and carefully designed stimuli, they replicate the core findings in five laboratory experiments. Further, testing the underlying mechanism, they find that greater similarity facilitates the ease with which consumers can process the review, which, in turn, increases that review's helpfulness to consumers. Finally, they show that factors that impede the ease of processing (e.g., language difficulty or poor image quality) can reduce the effect of similarity on helpfulness. These findings provide novel insights into the value of user-generated content that includes text and photos and its underlying mechanism.