Self or simulacra of online reviews : an empirical perspective

Online user-generated content (UGC) includes various forms of computer-mediated online reviews, ratings, and feedback. The impact of online consumer reviews has been widely studied particularly in e-commerce, online marketing, and consumer behavior domains using text-mining and sentiment analysis. Such studies often assume that consumer-submitted online reviews truly represent consumer experiences, but multiple studies on online social networks suggest otherwise. Drawing from the social network literature, this paper investigates the impact of peers on consumer willingness to write and submit online reviews. An empirical study using data from “Yelp,” a globally used online restaurant review website, shows that the number of friends and fans positively impacts the number of online consumer reviews written. Implications for research and practice are discussed