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Top1. Introduction
Online reviews have become a major information source in making consumers’ purchase decisions (Dellarocas, 2003; Godes & Mayzlin, 2004; Zhao, Yang, Narayan, & Zhao, 2013). Many consumers utilize online reviews when making their purchase decisions, and for this reason, reviews are widely considered to be more credible than advertisements and other seller-generated product information (Nielsen, 2007). Previous studies in this subject field have also noted that online reviews may have a significant influence onto the consumers’ purchase decisions (Goh, Heng, & Lin, 2013; Zhang, Zhao, Cheung, & Lee, 2014) and also retailers’ sales (Chevalier & Mayzlin, 2003; Gu, Park, & Konana, 2012; Ho-Dac, Carson, & Moore, 2013; Lee, Lee, & Shin, 2011; X. Lu, Ba, Huang, & Feng, 2013; Sun, 2012). To this end, online reviews have increasingly become an important resource that both consumers and retailers should seriously take into account.
Information overload is one of the major challenges for online shoppers and this simply because electronic commerce tends to increase the amount of information that customers must deal with before they are able to select the particular items to meet their specific needs (Schafer, Konstan, & Riedi, 1999). One solution to this information overload problem is to utilize the interactive decision aids (IDAs). According to earlier research, the source of information overload can be either products-oriented (e.g., too many candidate products to evaluate) or reviews-oriented (e.g., too many reviews to read). However, previous studies on IDAs have mainly focused on the recommendation agents; for example, tools that address the problem of product information overload by eliciting users’ preferences; to carry out a set of search and evaluation operations on behalf of users, and thus provide the adequate product recommendations (Maes, Guttman, & Moukas, 1999; Wang & Benbasat, 2009; Xiao & Benbasat, 2007). With the rapid development of electronic commerce and social media technologies, the volume of customer reviews appeared on the Internet is increasing at an unprecedented speed. Unfortunately, research on IDAs to address the problem of information overload related to reviews has been lacking in this subject field.