Investigation of potency-magnitude relations of eWOM messages with a focus on intensified comparative expressions

Electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM) is an important information source that influences consumer product evaluations. The author previously developed a computational model that predicts the potency-magnitude relations of eWOM messages involving subjective rank expressions, which refer to the linguistic representations related to the attitude-levels of the benefits of product attributes. This paper extends the typology of eWOM messages and investigates mathematically potency-magnitude relations with a focus on intensified comparative expressions, which involve the “degree” of the differences between two or more objects. The investigations include the developments of a Q-magnitude Relation Map (Q-Map) and a Priority Message-Class Map (P-Map), which illustrate how the relations change based on the values of two evaluation parameters: evaluation target size and evaluation scale size. The effects of the messages involving intensified comparative expressions are discussed from the viewpoint of eWOM message filtering agents that promote consumer product evaluations. The investigations were performed first under the premise of a strict assumption called an interval assumption and the results were then verified and discussed under the premise of a conservative assumption called a surjection assumption.