Investigation of Potency-magnitude Relations of eWOM Messages with a Focus on the Distinction between Attitude Direction and Strength

Electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM) is an important information source that influences consumer product evaluations. The author previously developed a computational model, called an inference space 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 (1) revises the inference space model so as to evaluate the messages that do not state the degree of the attitude strength but state only the attitude direction, positive or negative, and (2) mathematically investigates the potency-magnitude relations of message types differentiating the attitude direction and the strength. The investigations include the developments of a Q-magnitude Relation Map (Q-Map) which illustrates how the potency-magnitude relations change based on the values of two evaluation parameters: evaluation target size and evaluation scale size. The results are discussed from the viewpoint of eWOM message filtering agents that promote consumer product evaluations.