An investigation of factors that contribute to movie review helpfulness in the Chinese market

Abstract

This paper aims to study the factors that contribute to movie review helpfulness in the Chinese market. Using 2,197 movie reviews and 1,876 reviewers’ information from the top 100 films published in 2020 on Douban.com, this paper mainly focuses on two sources of features that may contribute to the helpfulness of movie reviews, namely, review-related factors (Review Length, Review Timeliness, Review Extremity, and Review Reply) and reviewer-related factors (Reviewer Expertise and Reviewer Follower). A zero-inflated-negative-binomial (ZINB) regression model is employed to reveal the determinants of movie review helpfulness and a general linear regression as robustness checking. The findings of this study are two folds. First, Review Reply is proven to be a significant factor in movie review helpfulness. Second, movie review helpfulness is highly associated with factors except for Reviewer Expertise. The theoretical and practical implications drawn from these findings are also discussed.