The effect of mobile reviewing on review helpfulness: The moderation of review solicitation and reviewer popularity

Consumers increasingly read and post online reviews through mobile devices. Drawing upon the motivation, opportunity, and ability framework, we hypothesize the interesting interplay of mobile reviewing, firm review solicitation and reviewer popularity on review helpfulness. Using a large‐scale data set of 1,024,062 reviews from TripAdvisor, we reveal the double‐edged sword effect of mobile reviewing on review helpfulness. Compared to nonmobile reviews, mobile reviews are more emotional, less cognitive and more perceptual, which enhances review helpfulness; however, they are also shorter and less readable, which hurts review helpfulness. Furthermore, hotel review solicitation and reviewer popularity moderate on the aforementioned effects. Compared to organic reviewing, solicitated reviewing weakens both the negative and positive effects of mobile reviewing and elicits more cognitive, more readable, longer but less experiential (i.e., emotional and perceptual) mobile reviews than nonmobile reviews. Meanwhile, compared to unpopular reviewers, popular reviewers mainly strengthen the positive effect of mobile reviewing and write more experiential, more readable, but less cognitive and shorter mobile reviews than nonmobile reviews. Our findings offer practical guidelines for marketers to leverage the power of mobile reviews and downplay their disadvantages, and meanwhile produce meaningful implications for eWOM marketing.