Research on the influence mechanism of key halo effect and Matthew effect on product online word-of-mouth: considering the moderating role of online store service quality

The company benefits greatly from online word-of-mouth (OWM) for its products through e-commerce platforms. However, previous research neglects the critical influence mechanism of OWM for products sold in online stores, especially the relationships between consumers’ past subjective impressions and OWM. This study innovatively explores the influence mechanism of key halo effect and Matthew effect on product OWM considering the moderating role of online store PSQ namely store trust. We propose a research model and influencing factors for the halo effect and Matthew effect in the e-commerce platform scenario. Collecting about 30,000 online reviews and 160,000 historical consumer reviews from Amazon, we use a semantic similarity model to match online reviews with a standard scale for the relevant variables, combining text mining and econometric analysis. Our results show that the selected hierarchical regression model has better fit than existing common models. And the halo effect and Matthew effect are indeed beneficial to increase product OWM including the indicators of consumer satisfaction and future consumption intention. And there is a reverse effect with low perceived service quality and star rating Matthew effect on product OWM is not supported. These findings help us understand consumers’ online comment behaviors, and have deep implications for e-commerce platforms and related companies.