Can Online Rating Reflect Authentic Customer Purchase Feelings? Understanding How Customer Dissatisfaction Relates to Negative Reviews

The fast growth in online word of mouth (online WOM) reviews has witnessed their wide applications in assisting customers in their purchases. While many positive factors about these reviews have been identified, biases may result from reviewers' self-selection behavior. To examine whether online WOM ratings reflect authentic customer purchase feelings, this study focuses on the relation between customer dissatisfaction and negative reviews. First, the reviews are fine grained into feature-opinion pairs, after which three explanatory variables are designed to represent the individual, collective, and comprehensive (individual and collective) complaints, with the online rating being considered as the explained variable. Finally, a simple linear regression model is built to determine the relation between customer dissatisfaction (represented by discounting marks of ratings) and negative reviews. Our analysis finds that personal complaints have a positive effect on rating and the most frequent customer complaints have no significant effect on customer ratings.