A major goal of this paper is to explore how the user-generated
textual content of a review and the self-reported characteristics
of the reviewer who generated the review can influence
economic transactions (such as product sales) and online
community and social behavior (such as peer recognition in
the form of helpful votes). To examine this, we collected data
about the economic transactions on Amazon.com and analyzed
the associated review system. In this section, we describe the
data that we collected from Amazon; furthermore, we discuss
how we computed the variables to perform our analysis, based
on the discussion of Section 2