Developing an a-Priori Model of Online Review Process

More and more online feedback is being relied upon to make choices about the purchases and services we use daily. Conversely, companies rely on online reviews to find new customers and understand how people perceive them. Therefore, the online reviewing process and all its entities and processes are salient. Hence, in this research, we analyse online review related trends in research between the years 2000–2021 with an inductive categorization of 181 articles, in over fifty leading academic outlets. Using this categorization, we next investigate trends in the discussion and research on the online reviewer, online review, and review reaction. From these trends, we develop a nomological a-priori net of the online review process. Further, we discuss, some limitations of the current literature, posit research directions for future scholars and address the gaps in the current research on the online review process

Role of Platform Incentives in Shaping Local Guides’ Online Review Behaviour

Several online review platforms offer status or financial incentives to motivate individuals to write reviews and keep them engaged with the platforms. Drawing upon expectation-confirmation theory (ECT), this study examines whether there is a difference between the online review behaviour patterns of reviewers who do and do not receive incentives. We study the valence of online ratings that can be contingent upon incentives provided by the platform, influencing reviewer behaviour. This study argues that satisfaction with the expectations may lead non-incentive receivers to be more eager to share their genuine opinion. With the contingent nature of the platform, incentive receivers may display biased behaviour. In this paper, we use web-scraped data from Google Reviews. Interestingly, receiving incentives significantly affects the valence of review ratings. Our research aims to provide important implications for businesses that rely on user contributions and platform managers to create effective and strong incentive programs

A Critical Assessment of Online Vs. Traditional Review Characteristics

With the expansion of internet-based platforms, social media and sharing economy, most individuals are tempted to review products or services that they consume. While useful in various ways, such online reviews raise questions about the reviewer’s expertise, authenticity, intent, and the scales employed in such online reviews. There are emerging evidences that issues pertaining to online reviews have led to damaging consequences for businesses. With the intention of creating an awareness of reviewer characteristics and scales employed in online reviews, we present findings of 220 research papers. The review of literature identifies salient review and reviewer characteristics as well as the scale characteristics of traditional reviews and online reviews

Fall from its Grace: Are Internet Reviews Losing its Influence?

Online reviews surge as a topic in research and practice in the IT realm. Recently, there has been a massive discussion on fake reviews and the authenticity of online reviews. Hence, reviews’ trust is gradually declining given how bad review sites are at detecting fake reviews. This short paper contributes to this discourse of descending reign of online reviews in aligning to the information search process, considering implicit variables like trust, the proximity of information sources, and the abundance of information from a gender perspective. The preliminary results show that the male takes the opposite information search path as the female consumers. Females are losing their trust in online reviews and rely on proximate sources while males are still confident with online reviews. Further, this work contributes a new theoretical perspective to overcome the existing online review destruction by using the calibration of online and expert reviews

Death by reviews: Do online reviews lead firms to Bankruptcy?

The relationship between online reviews and a firm declaring bankruptcy may seem unlikely. However, notwithstanding the lack of quality in relation to products or services, there is a strong anecdotal commentary on how firms lose business due to bad reviews, despite the perceived high quality of products. As such, this short paper attempts to evoke a critical dialogue on the question, “Do instantiated or malicious review cause firms to lose business beyond recovery?” The paper provides exploratory evidence and attempts to provide a theoretical basis that explains this potential issue faced by millions of businesses around the world and contributes to identifying any possible pattern between negative online reviews and bankruptcy, theoretical foundations, and provides practical suggestions to mitigate the risk of bankruptcy for businesses by better managing the influx of negative reviews. Further, this paper will identify avenues for future research