Effects of sentiment quantity, dispersion, and dissimilarity on online review forwarding behavior: An empirical analysis

Online forwarding behavior, which involves users sharing information through URLs on social media platforms, has been extensively acknowledged as important to businesses, society, and individuals. Although previous research has discussed its antecedents from the sentiment perspective, most of them focus on the effect size, without differentiating the distinct effects of positive and negative sentiment. This study not only tests the association between positive (negative) sentiment and online forwarding but also examines how the aforementioned association varies from sentiment dispersion, measured by the variance of sentiment between individuals and groups (i.e., positive vs. negative sentiment dispersions); and sentiment dissimilarity, measured by the inconsistency between review content and title in terms of sentiment (i.e., positive vs. negative sentiment dissimilarities). Analysis of the data set collected from TripAdvisor yields the following findings: (1) positive sentiment negatively affects forwarding behavior, (2) negative sentiment positively affects forwarding behavior, (3) positive sentiment dispersion strengthens the negative effect of positive sentiment, but the moderation effect of positive sentiment dissimilarity is insignificant, and (4) negative sentiment dispersion/dissimilarity dampens the positive effect of negative sentiment. Findings extend our understanding of sentiment and online forwarding by highlighting the heterogeneous effects of positive and negative sentiments, thereby providing suggestions for forwarding function design.