Inferring Consumers’ Motivations for Writing Reviews

In recent years, product reviews have taken an important role in helping consumers make online purchasing decisions, but only a small proportion of consumers post their reviews online. Researchers pointed out that consumers can be divided into distinct groups in terms of their motivations for eWOM (electronic word-of-mouth), and different strategies should be developed based on different motivation groups. However, the effort of explicitly acquiring motivations via questionnaire is unavoidably high, which may impede developing different strategies to different motivation groups. In this paper, we identified a set of consumers’ motivations and behavior data. Then, we performed a user survey to validate whether the behavioral features are significantly correlated with consumers’ motivations. These findings lay solid foundation to develop more adaptive design solutions for encouraging eWOM participation.