Reviews’ length and sentiment as correlates of online reviews’ ratings

Purpose This research focuses on two main objectives. First, identifying and validating reviews’ length and sentiment as correlates of online reviews’ ratings. Second, understanding the emotions embedded in online reviews and how they associate with specific words used in such reviews. Design/methodology/approach A panel dataset of customer reviews was collected for auto, life, and home insurance from January 2012 to December 2015 using a web scraping technique. Using a sentiment analysis approach, 1584 reviews for the auto, home, and life insurance services of 156 insurance companies were analyzed. Findings Results indicate that, since 2013, consumers have generally had more negative emotions than positive ones toward insurance services. The results also show that consumer review sentiment correlates positively and review length correlates negatively with consumer online review ratings. Furthermore, a two-way ANOVA analysis shows that, in general, short reviews with positive sentiment are associated with...