Consumer Review Valence and Its Influence on Online Purchase Decision-Making
Keywords:
Consumer review valence; online purchase decision-making; electronic word of mouth; digital commerce infrastructure; review governance; platform fairness; information systems designAbstract
The growth of digital commerce has made consumer review systems a central component of online purchase decision-making. Within these systems, review valence, defined as the positive, negative, or neutral orientation of consumer-generated evaluations, exerts a powerful but context-dependent influence on consumer judgments, product perceptions, and sales outcomes. This paper examines review valence not as an isolated psychological cue but as a system-level phenomenon shaped by platform architecture, aggregation logic, governance mechanisms, and broader socio-technical infrastructure. The discussion integrates evidence from information systems, marketing, and platform economics to analyze how valence interacts with reviewer credibility, rating variance, temporal dynamics, and consumer characteristics. Structural trade-offs emerge in the design of review aggregation and ranking systems, particularly between simplicity and diagnostic richness, between transparency and manipulation resistance, and between consumer protection and merchant fairness. The paper further considers governance challenges associated with promotional reviews, algorithmic filtering, and reputational feedback loops. Because review valence influences willingness to pay, perceived risk, and trust, its management has direct implications for platform sustainability and regulatory policy. A system-level perspective highlights that valence is not merely a summary of consumer opinion but an emergent informational resource shaped by incentives, interface design, and data governance. The paper concludes by discussing deployment challenges, fairness concerns, and policy implications for digital commerce ecosystems, emphasizing the need for robust, transparent, and adaptive review infrastructures that preserve the informational value of consumer voice while limiting strategic distortion.
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This article is published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
