Rating and perceived helpfulness in a bipartite network of online product reviews

In many e-commerce platforms user communities share product information in the form of reviews and ratings to help other consumers to make their choices. This study develops a new theoretical framework generating a bipartite network of products sold by Amazon.com in the category "musical instruments", by linking products through the reviews. We analyze product rating and perceived helpfulness of online customer reviews and the relationship between the centrality of reviews, product rating and the helpfulness of reviews using Clustering, regression trees, and random forests algorithms to, respectively, classify and find patterns in 2214 reviews. Results demonstrate: (1) that a high number of reviews do not imply a high product rating; (2) when reviews are helpful for consumer decision-making we observe an increase on the number of reviews; (3) a clear positive relationship between product rating and helpfulness of the reviews; and (4) a weak relationship between the centrality measures (betweenness and eigenvector) giving the importance of the product in the network, and the quality measures (product rating and helpfulness of reviews) regarding musical instruments. These results suggest that products may be central to the network, although with low ratings and with reviews providing little helpfulness to consumers. The findings in this study provide several important contributions for e-commerce businesses' improvement of the review service management to support customers' experiences and online customers' decision-making.