Blockchain Bachelor’s Thesis – Information Overload and Methods of its Elimination in the Modern Information Society: Going Through the Sources pt. 5

Source

Previously published

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Introduction

Blockchainized Bachelor’s Thesis
Blockchainized Bachelor’s Thesis – Initial Brainstorm

Thesis

1. Preface

Sources

1.Battling Information Overload in the Information Age
2.1.The knowledge-attention-gap: Do we underestimate the problem of information overload in knowledge management? pt.1
2.2.The knowledge-attention-gap: Do we underestimate the problem of information overload in knowledge management? pt. 2
3.Database Research faces the Information Explosion
4.The experience of mobile information overload: struggling between needs and constraints
5.Longer online reviews are not necessarily better

Case study: Interview

1. First draft

Article

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Fink, L, Rosenfeld, L, & Ravid, G 2018, 'Longer online reviews are not necessarily better', International Journal Of Information Management, 39, pp. 30-37, Library & Information Science Source, EBSCOhost

Longer online reviews are not necessarily better

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„These cognitive limitations, however, are largely absent in research on the effectiveness of online consumer-generated product reviews. Driven by the motivation to understand word-of-mouth behavior in an era of electronic commerce (Ahmad & Laroche, 2017; King, Racherla, & Bush, 2014), numerous attempts have been made in the past decade to empirically capture how quantitative and qualitative characteristics of online product reviews are related to consumer behavior, in particular to product sales (e.g., Chevalier & Mayzlin, 2006; Floyd, Freling, Alhoqail, Cho, & Freling, 2014; Forman, Ghose, & Wiesenfeld, 2008; Ghose & Ipeirotis, 2011; Gu, Park, & Konana, 2012; Neirotti, Raguseo, & Paolucci, 2016) A characteristic often observed in such empirical investigations is review length, typically measured as the average number of characters or words included in reviews for a specific product. This characteristic is consistently hypothesized to be positively related to either product sales or review helpfulness (Baek, Ahn, & Choi, 2012; Fang, Zhang, Bao, & Zhu, 2013; Mudambi & Schuff, 2010). The reasoning underlying these hypotheses rests on two arguments. The first is that longer reviews are less likely to be overlooked than shorter reviews because they take up more screen space and are visually more salient (Kuan, Hui, Prasarnphanich, & Lai, 2015). The second argument is that compared to shorter reviews, longer reviews contain more product-related information, which is likely to increase the consumer's confidence about the purchase decision (Schwenk, 1986; Tversky & Kahneman, 1974) and mitigate product-related uncertainty. Indeed, such predictions about the positive effects of review length have frequently been supported by evidence (Baek et al., 2012; Chevalier & Mayzlin, 2006; Hu & Chen, 2016; Korfiatis, García-Bariocanal, & Sánchez-Alonso, 2012; Pan & Zhang, 2011; Willemsen, Neijens, Bronner, & Ridder, 2011; Wu, 2013; Zhang, Craciun, & Shin, 2010).
Notwithstanding these positive effects, it follows from information processing theory that, at certain review lengths, information overload may become an issue and the marginal utility of product-related information may become negative.“

Reviews are fundamental part of the decision making process. What I mean by that is not that every time one wants to make a decision it’s crucial to read a review (that might not even be possible), but rather the fact that review basically is a subjective experience of other individual about the aspect or a thing that you yourself want to use. That in other words means that previously an individual has already processed information about the aspect/thing you yourself want to use and the review itself provides valuable information about it. It basically is another information input, but with the already pre-processed information, which enables the user to understand the aspect/thing for the lesser cost of energy. In a decentralized sphere reviews play even bigger role than in the past, but that would be a theme for different time.

Information overload though is a persistent nuisance. For game theorist like myself, more data almost always mean possibly more knowledge about the studied object. As the reference studies show, larger reviews tend to contain more useful information about the product and are even more eye-catching. Truth be told though that doesn’t necessarily have to be the case. After all, good review should contain a lot of objective information. The review doesn’t have to be good though and can contain a lot of subjective and irrelevant information. The fact that the review is longer also doesn’t mean that it has to be more eye-catching than shorter but well-structured review. Nevertheless it’s important to realize, that information overload may occur everywhere, even while going through submitted reviews by other users. Such a knowledge is important for both, review consumers, but even review producers.

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„In this study, we argue that the positive effects attributed in the existing literature to review length have been the consequence of the frequent reliance on data that reflect the use of personal computers (PCs) rather than mobile devices to engage in electronic commerce. Because the PC setting is typically less constrained than the mobile setting in terms of the time, attention, and screen size available to users, larger amounts of information can be consumed by PC users before they experience information overload. In such settings, therefore, the point of optimum cognitive load, above which the marginal utility of product-related information is negative, is less likely to be observed, resulting in a conclusion that longer reviews are generally more beneficial to users. We hypothesize that in settings of mobile use, in which use is typically more constrained either by the environment or by features of the platform, the point of optimum cognitive load is more likely to be observed in data reflecting the behavior of users, resulting in a conclusion that longer reviews are not necessarily better.“

Yet again another study tackles the problem of portable devices and that is the small screen compared to the one of the PC. What I find very important about that is that the majority of information society actually connects to the internet via portable devices. That ultimately means that majority of the population is more likely to be under the influence of the information overload. It doesn’t matter whether the perceived subject is a review, article, or any other form of written text. The point is that people in order to save time connect to those information “while on the move” and that can lead to negative consequences of information overload. In the case study I tried to tackle the difference between portable devices and PCs and I’ll make sure to really try to get to know whether the participants can prove those studies right or wrong.

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„The mobile setting is more constrained than the PC setting in two aspects. First, by definition, mobile devices are more likely to be used when people are mobile (e.g., walking on the street or sitting in a train station) and can devote less attention to information processing than when they are using stationary PCs. Given that attention is the scarce resource in decision making (Simon, 1978), the need to pay more attention to the environment reduces the attention available for information processing. Second, screen sizes are typically smaller in the mobile setting than in the PC setting, leading to higher costs of information search (Ghose, Goldfarb, & Han, 2013) and to inferior task performance (Sweeney & Crestani, 2006). These two factors – lower attention to information processing and higher information search costs – which characterize the mobile setting in comparison to the PC setting, imply that information overload is likely to be experienced in the mobile setting after processing smaller amounts of information. Because previous research used data largely reflecting the PC setting, characterized by higher optimum load thresholds, it is reasonable that most review length observations were distributed at values lower than these thresholds, indicating that utility always increases with review length.“

Previous paragraph tackled the problem of smaller screens, but that obviously is not the only problem with portable devices. Another problem, and I find that one to be of a much bigger importance, is the “divided attention”. As the author rightly states, portable devices are MEANT to be used on the move. When one is on the move, real life tend to happen and real life requires our attention. Being able to pay attention to one single subject is quickly becoming a “lost skill” to the information society. I’ll try to tackle the problem of attention in my case study and hopefully gather relevant information about the problem from my participants.

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„As for idiosyncratic findings, the existing literature, which has focused on information processing via PCs, does include a few accounts of contradicting evidence, which allude to the existence of a negative curvilinear effect of review length. Importantly, these studies hypothesize about a positive effect of review length, but their evidence suggests that this is not necessarily the case. Huang et al. (2015) examine the effect of review length on review helpfulness by analyzing data on six products from Amazon.com. They find that while review length has a significant positive effect for all reviews, this aggregate positive effect masks a positive effect for reviews shorter than average (144 words) and no effect for reviews longer than average. Based on these findings, they conclude that word count has a threshold in its effect on review helpfulness, above which “its effect diminishes significantly or becomes near non-existent” (Huang et al., 2015, p. 17).“

The relevance for the topic of information overload has been continuously decreasing the further in the text I have gotten. I though wanted the readers to know the outcome of this study. I highly recommend reading the whole article if you by any chance do reviews, or plan to do reviews in the future. If you want to be highly effective and reduce the possibility for your readers to undergo information overload, this article is a great source of information.

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• „The literature shows that review length is positively related to product demand.
• We hypothesize that review length has a negative curvilinear relationship with demand.
• This hypothesis is tested with large-scale data on mobile apps from two app stores.
• The results provide consistent evidence in support of a negative curvilinear relationship.
• The results also suggest that information processing is different for free and paid apps.“

Those are the highlights of the article. The result is that there probably really is negative curvilinear effect – meaning that at first the effectivity of the review grows with its length, but it is slowly decreasing until reaching the threshold where readers do enter the “information overload zone”. Till then the effectivity of the review is only decreasing with its length.

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