  Negative reviews, the poor ratings in postpurchase evaluation, play an
indispensable role in e-commerce, especially in shaping future sales and firm
equities. However, extant studies seldom examine their potential value for
sellers and producers in enhancing capabilities of providing better services
and products. For those who exploited the helpfulness of reviews in the view of
e-commerce keepers, the ranking approaches were developed for customers
instead. To fill this gap, in terms of combining description texts and emotion
polarities, the aim of the ranking method in this study is to provide the most
helpful negative reviews under a certain product attribute for online sellers
and producers. By applying a more reasonable evaluating procedure, experts with
related backgrounds are hired to vote for the ranking approaches. Our ranking
method turns out to be more reliable for ranking negative reviews for sellers
and producers, demonstrating a better performance than the baselines like BM25
with a result of 8% higher. In this paper, we also enrich the previous
understandings of emotions in valuing reviews. Specifically, it is surprisingly
found that positive emotions are more helpful rather than negative emotions in
ranking negative reviews. The unexpected strengthening from positive emotions
in ranking suggests that less polarized reviews on negative experience in fact
offer more rational feedbacks and thus more helpfulness to the sellers and
producers. The presented ranking method could provide e-commerce practitioners
with an efficient and effective way to leverage negative reviews from online
consumers.
