Customer service employees are generally advised to express positive emotion in their interactions with customers. The rise and maturity of artificial intelligence (AI) powered conversational agents, also known as chatbots, beg the question: should AI agents be equipped with the ability to...

While monetary rewards have been widely used by online platforms to motivate user-generated content (UGC) contributions, users may not demonstrate the expected behaviors. Unintended consequences, exemplified by unchanged or reduced UGC contributions, may occur. Through two natural experiments,...

In the online word-of-mouth literature, research has consistently shown that negative reviews have a greater impact on product sales than positive reviews. While this negativity effect is well documented at the product level, there is less consensus on whether negative or positive reviews are...

Electronic commerce has grown rapidly in recent years. However, surveys of online customers continue to indicate that many remain unsatisfied with their online purchase experiences. Clearly, more research is needed to better understand what affects customers’ evaluations of their online...

This paper explores effects of the emotions embedded in a seller review on its perceived helpfulness to readers. Drawing on frameworks in the emotion and cognitive processing literatures, we propose that over and above a well-known negativity bias, the impact of discrete emotions in a review...

This research explores how expressed emotional arousal in a consumer review affects reader perceptions of its helpfulness. Drawing from research on written communication and lay theories of emotion, the authors propose a pattern of diminishing returns, in which the marginal effect of arousal on...