Effects of Visual Cues in Reviews on Review Consumption and Review Contribution

Review platforms have design options in how they present user contributions and can either provide images directly in-line with review text or separate images and text to different areas of the website. Drawing from media synchronicity theory, our paper systematically examines the relationship between platform design decisions related to the integration of text and photos in reviews and the outcomes from review consumption and review contribution processes. In particular, this study investigates whether and how providing visual cues about products in reviews (the in-line option) affects review helpfulness, product ratings and review text novelty. The identification strategy is a natural experiment on Yelp.com in June 2013. We examined the reviews of the same set of 2,881 restaurants from Yelp and TripAdvisor and used a difference-in-differences approach to identify the causal effect. The results suggest providing visual cues in reviews leads to a reduction review helpfulness of extreme reviews. The results also suggest that providing visual cues improves consumers’ product understanding and post-consumption satisfaction and thus increased product ratings, especially when rating variance of a product is high. In addition, we find that providing visual cues in reviews aids users to describe more novel aspects of products in review text.