Helpful or Unhelpful: The Hidden Influence of Review Voters and the Wisdom of Crowds

Online review platforms use voting systems to identify and promote helpful reviews, aiming to alleviate information overload for potential consumers. Existing research has primarily focused on how review and reviewer characteristics affect review helpfulness but has largely overlooked the role of voters. Drawing on cognitive consistency theories, we propose that review voters cast votes in ways that align with their historical content-related activities, perceptions of review context, and social relationships with reviewers. Using a unique, fine-grained vote-level dataset, we find that voter-related factors have a more pronounced impact on review helpfulness than review or reviewer characteristics do. These findings suggest that past research examining antecedents of review helpfulness may have overestimated the effects of review and reviewer characteristics and that more attention to voters is warranted.