Review Helpfulness Score vs. Review Unhelpfulness Score: Two Sides of the Same Coin or Different Coins?

Online review platforms have increasingly incorporated the review evaluating system, which allows users to evaluate whether reviews are helpful or unhelpful to assist review readers and encourage review contributors. Although the review helpfulness score has been studied extensively in the literature, our knowledge regarding its counterpart, the review unhelpfulness score, is lacking. Addressing this gap in the literature is important because researchers and practitioners have adopted the unhelpfulness score assuming that it is driven by intrinsic review characteristics and that it can identify low-quality reviews. This study validates this conventional wisdom by examining the factors influencing the unhelpfulness score. We found that, unlike the review helpfulness score, the unhelpfulness score is generally not driven by intrinsic review characteristics. We also found that users who receive review unhelpfulness votes are more likely to cast unhelpfulness votes to other reviews. Finally, unhelpfulness voters engage much less with the platform than helpfulness voters do.