A Study of Online Review Promptness in a B2C System

Web 2.0 technologies have attracted an increasing number of active online writers and viewers. A deeper understanding of when customers will review and what motivates them to write online reviews is of both theoretical and practical significance. In this paper, we present a novel methodological framework, which consists of theoretical modeling and text-mining technologies, to study the relationships among customers' review promptness, their review opinions, and their review motivations. We first study customers' online "purchase-review" behavior dynamics; then, we introduce the LDA method to mine customers' opinion from their review text; finally, we propose a theoretical model to explore some motivations for those people publishing review online. The analytical and experimental results with real data from a Chinese B2C website demonstrate that the behavior dynamics of customers' online review are influenced by the multidimensional motivations, and some of them can be observed from their review behaviors, such as review promptness.