Towards Digital Sustainability: Profiles of Millennial Reviewers, Reputation Scores and Intrinsic Motivation Matter

Abstract

Profiles of millennial reviewers and gamification can contribute to digital sustainability as a driver of innovation and growth. The study aims to detect if there are profiles of reviewers that can be grouped together, in order to apply a specific gamification to them and to make it sustainable over time. In this way, more information will be generated through the reviews that will help responsible consumers to choose better in their purchase decisions. The objective of this study is twofold. First, it aims to characterize online product reviewers based on their intrinsic motivations and self-perception when they comment, identifying their main motivations. Second, it aims to classify these individuals based on the acceptance of gamification elements while commenting on and relating them to the intrinsic attributes that determine their behaviors. A survey method design was used to capture responses from 187 millennial reviewers of Amazon in Spain. The relationships between motivations and the types of reviewer were extracted from the accommodation of the dataset using decision trees (DTs), specifically, the J48 algorithm. To contribute to the second objective, this paper elaborates a typology of reviewer analysis based on cluster analysis and DTs. It is confirmed that online product reviewers can be characterized based on their intrinsic motivations, which are mainly egoistic motives, competence and social relatedness. The obtained results show that the J48 DT provides excellent classification accuracy of approximately 95% in identifying reviewers based on intrinsic motivations. Similarly, egoistic intrinsic motives are decisive in focusing gamification strategies.