Culture, Conformity, and Emotional Suppression in Online Reviews

In this study, we examine consumers’ cultural background as an antecedent of online review characteristics. We theoretically propose and empirically examine the effect of cultural background (specifically individualism (versus collectivism)) on consumers’ tendency to conform to prior opinion and review texts’ emotionality. We also examine how conformity and emotionality relate to review helpfulness. We test our hypotheses using a unique dataset that combines online restaurant reviews from TripAdvisor with measures of individualism/collectivism values. We found that consumers from a collectivist culture were less likely to deviate from the average prior rating and to express emotion in their reviews. Moreover, individuals perceived those reviews that exhibited high conformity and intense emotions to be less helpful. We also present several important implications for managing online review platforms in light of these findings, which reflect the previously unidentified drivers of systematic differences in the characteristics of online reviews

Exploring Cross-National Differences in Online Review Topics between China and the United States

The fast growing cross-border e-commerce makes it imperative for online merchants to deeply understand the cross-national differences in consumers’ preferences and online shopping behaviors. Using a data-driven topic model, this study plans to investigate the semantic differences in online product reviews posted by consumers from China and the United Sates. The preliminary results from a pilot study of online reviews of books show that Chinese reviewers focus more on a product’s concrete attributes while American reviewers prefer to express their general evaluations of the product

The Differences of Online Review Textual Content: A Cross-Cultural Empirical Study

This research do a cross-cultural study by examine the differences of online review textual content between China, America and Australian. Through the online review text segmentation, classifying words by coding schema, calculating word proportion of each category, the research analyzes the differences of online review textual content from the aspects of textual type, content preference and textual emotion. The research finds that, cultural differences have significant effect on the online review textual type, Chinese customers prefer to describe objective facts while American & Australian customers prefer to describe subjective feelings; For textual emotion, Chinese customers prefer to express negative emotions while American & Australian customers prefer to express positive emotions. But cultural differences show no significant effect on the online review content preference

An Empirical Investigation of Culture’s Influence in Online Service Ratings: From the Perspective of Uncertainty Avoidance

In order to figure out the influence of consumers’ cultural background on their online review generation behavior, this study aims to investigate how consumers’ uncertainty avoidance values influence their online ratings. Utilizing data collected from a major travel review website, TripAdvisor, we find a negative relationship between uncertainty avoidance degree and online review rating. Consumers’ travel type and hotel star are found to have a moderating effect between consumers’ uncertainty avoidance and their online ratings. Moreover, the negative effect of uncertainty avoidance value on review rating is weaker for consumers on business travel, and this effect also decreases for upscale hotels. The results are further confirmed by a robustness check using another method. From a theoretical perspective, our study enriches existing literature dealing with online reviews. From a practical perspective, our research findings provide helpful insights to hotel practitioners

The Value of Incorporating Review Tags into an Online Review System for User Review Generation

Online review mining has become an important way for businesses to understand consumer preferences and product characteristics. Many online review platforms have started to incorporate the extracted information as review tags to guide future reviews. In this study, we leverage a quasi-experiment from an online health service platform to investigate the value of incorporating the review tags (extracted from prior reviews) into the online review system in user review generation. Our preliminary results show that after the provision of review tags, more reviews are provided for doctors but the length of those reviews is shorter. Notably, we also find a decrease in sentiment and an increase in novel reviews. Our findings provide actionable managerial insights for platform managers to design online review systems

How Online Diaries Persuade Customers — The Role of Narratives

Online diary is a series of reviews in chronological order generated by customers to record their experience over time, which is a new type of online review emerging in the medical beauty industry. This study extends narrative transportation theory to explore the effect of the dynamic structure of online diaries on persuasion. We posit that emotional shift and utilitarian value can positively enhance online diary persuasion through improving transportation, and the relationship between the temporal flow and persuasion is converse U shape. The moderating role of social influence and visual content richness to the main effect is also investigated in this study. We collected real data to test our hypotheses utilizing Natural Language Processing (NLP) method and econometric model. This study is expected to make both theoretical and practical contributions

What Makes Consumer Perception of Online Review Helpfulness: Synthesizing the Past to Guide Future Research

A growing body of academic research has aimed to investigate the helpfulness of online customer reviews (OCRs) given their prevalence and the need to better understand their appraisal mechanisms. However, past studies have applied varied methods and reported conflicting findings. This study aims to improve the understanding of the contributors to OCR helpfulness by synthesizing past studies on the topic. Based on a systematic literature review, a summary of the precursors to OCR helpfulness is provided. We decipher both the consistent and conflicting results and discuss the possible explanations for these mixed findings. By summarizing past studies, the review also points out possible directions for future research

Political Leaders’ Communication Style and Public Perceptions: Case of the COVID-19 Crisis

In this study, we examine the political leaders’ communication style and its influence on the public behaviour about the COVID-19 crisis. We attempt to achieve our research objective by investigating the cases of Lee Hsien Loong in Singapore and Donald Trump in the United States (US). Using an inductive theory-building approach, nested multi-case study research design, we explore the relationship between political leaders’ communication style and public behaviour about COVID-19 crisis from a communication-centred perspective. We collect both social media data from political leaders and individual check-in data from Singapore and US from January to June 2020. By adopting two-stage analysis, we find that Lee Hsien Loong’s use of “engaging” communication style in preventing the spread of COVID-19 led to a more significant decrease of the public movement in comparison to Donald Trump’s use of “champion of the people” communication style

Online Review Censorship

Ample anecdotal evidence in the media notes that many businesses seek to ‘silence’ negative reviews, e.g., via legal threat. Despite attention toward this issue, we are aware of no systematic analyses addressing it. We address that gap here, leveraging review data from TripAdvisor.com. First, we estimate that ~1% of truthful reviews are deleted within six months of posting and that negative reviews are significantly more likely to be deleted, consistent with a mechanism of censorship. The effect is substantial; we estimate that a 1-star decrease in rating valence is associated with an approximate 25% (0.25pp) increase in the probability of deletion. Second, we examine how freedom of expression (FoE) in a country associates with characteristics of (uncensored) online reviews. We find that FoE associates with larger review volumes, lower review valence, and faster review posting. We discuss implications for online ratings platforms, consumers, and research opportunities