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

Anonymity and Language Usage: A Natural Experiment of Social Network Integration

The Internet creates an anonymous and non-authoritarian environment where people do not have social inhibitions and can express opinions freely. However, such disinhibition at times leads to abusive use of language and uncivil behavior in the online environment. This paper leverages data from a natural experiment on an online review platform that integrated social network platform personalization features, which exposes users in an anonymous environment to a social environment. Interestingly, our preliminary findings show that after the social network platform integration, users express more emotions (specifically, they become more positive but less negative), are less likely to use inappropriate language that include sexually explicit words or words that shows rage. Further, users are less egocentric and more social in their language use. We discuss the implication of this study for creating a civil online environment

Do Consumers Make Less Accurate Decisions When They Use Mobiles?

The migration of consumers from personal computers (PCs) to mobile devices (mobiles) to engage in e-commerce has accelerated in recent years. Despite this trend, the literature tells us little about how the use of mobiles instead of PCs affects information processing and decision making. Seeking to untangle the implications of mobile use, this study defines the device and display as two orthogonal variables, which are hypothesized to affect decision accuracy (consistency with preferences), both directly and indirectly, through the mediating variables of information seeking and information load. Two laboratory experiments show that the mobile display (less information on the main page), but not the mobile device (smaller screen), affects information processing and decreases decision accuracy. Furthermore, when the information subset presented on the mobile display is of higher quality (more informative to the user), the consequences of mobile use relative to PC use are less adverse

The impact of accessibility of mobile devices on the intention to post online reviews

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to investigate how the characteristic of mobile devices, particularly high accessibility, influences a consumer's intention to post an online review depending on the valence of consumption experiences. Design/methodology/approach This paper employs a between-subject design of experimental study based on different scenarios with 378 participants. A pretest is conducted to confirm that participants perceive the experimental scenarios as intended prior to proceeding with the main experimental study. Findings The authors’ experimental analysis shows that the intention to post a review of extreme positive and negative experiences is significantly higher when the level of accessibility for review-posting is high. By contrast, the intention to post a review of neutral consumption experiences is neither higher nor lower regardless of the level of accessibility. Originality/value The findings of this paper contribute to a better understanding of online reviews by demonstrating how high accessibility for review-posting have differential influences on the intentions to post online reviews depending on the valence of consumer experiences. The findings provide important theoretical and managerial implications

Love at First Touch: How Swiping vs. Typing Changes Online Dating Decision-Making

Online dating is one of the fastest-growing industries in the United States. Due to its increasing popularity, various dimensions of online dating have been studied in recent years. However, no research has explored how the type of digital platforms used impacts online dating. In this research, we investigate how the use of different platforms (computers vs. smartphones) can influence customers’ decision-making process in the context of online dating. Through multiple studies, we demonstrate that while using their computers (vs. smartphones) to evaluate dating profiles, customers will prioritize the inner attributes of the person (e.g., personality and compatibility). Moreover, the effect of device type on customers’ online dating decision-making is moderated by customers’ gender. Finally, our results also exhibit a significant moderated mediation effect in that the device used by female participants moderates the indirect effect of inner attributes of dating profiles on customers evaluations through perceived psychological closeness. We further manipulated perceived psychological distance to dating profiles for females which reveals that when females use smartphones to look at dating profiles, the effect of psychological distance on participants\u27 rating is only significant when the profiles have attractive (vs. average) inner attributes. This research contributes to the literature on the use of computers vs. smartphones and the literature on gender differences in online dating. It also has important implications for online dating companies on how to design their websites and mobile applications more suited to customers’ preferences while also considering customers’ gender

Two Essays on Consumer-Generated Reviews: Reviewer Expertise and Mobile Reviews

Over the past few decades, the internet has risen to prominence, enabling consumers to not only quickly access large amounts of information, but also openly share content (e.g., blogs, videos, reviews) with a substantially large number of fellow consumers. Given the vast presence of consumers in the online space, it has become increasingly critical for marketers to better understand the way consumers share, and learn from, consumer-generated content, a research area known as electronic word-of-mouth. In this dissertation, I advance our understanding about the shared content generated by consumers on online review platforms. In Essay 1, I study why and how the expertise of consumers in generating reviews systematically shapes their rating evaluations and the downstream consequences this has on the aggregate valence metric. I theorize, and provide empirical evidence, that greater expertise in generating reviews leads to greater restraint from extremes in evaluations, which is driven by the number of attributes considered by reviewers. Further, I demonstrate two major consequences of this restraint-of-expertise effect. (i) Expert (vs. novice) reviewers have less impact on the aggregate valence metric, which is known to affect page-rank and consumer consideration. (ii) Experts systematically benefit and harm service providers with their ratings. For service providers that generally provide mediocre (excellent) experiences, experts assign significantly higher (lower) ratings than novices. Building on my investigation of expert reviewers, in Essay 2, I investigate the differential effects of generating reviews on mobile devices for expert and novice reviewers. I argue, based on Schema Theory, that expert and novice reviewers adopt different “strategies” in generating mobile reviews. Because of their review-writing experience, experts develop a review-writing schema, and compared to novices, place greater emphasis on the consistency of various review aspects, including emotionality of language and attribute coverage in their mobile reviews. Accordingly, although mobile (vs. desktop) reviews are shorter for both experts and novices, I show that experts (novice) generate mobile reviews that contain a slight (large) increase in emotional language and are more (less) attribute dense. Drawing on these findings, I advance managerial strategies for review platforms and service providers, and provide avenues for future research

Design of Review Systems – A Strategic Instrument to shape Online Reviewing Behavior and Economic Outcomes

As online reviews play a decisive role in consumers’ purchase decisions, e-commerce platforms are using review systems strategically to obtain a competitive advantage. However, the strategic potential can only be leveraged if the review system is designed appropriately. Research on the design of review systems and the effects of design choices has not yet been summarized or synthesized in a review article. We aim to close this gap by providing a scoping review. In our synthesis we posit that the design of review systems moderates the impact of online reviews on economic outcomes and the factors that drive the formation of reviews. After reviewing current research findings, we identify gaps and provide a research agenda covering three key themes: Design features, environments, and devices

What Happens When Word of Mouth Goes Mobile?

Individuals exhibit different behaviors between mobile and non-mobile devices, for multiple reasons. For example, mobile devices enable ubiquitous access, being portable, yet they also constrain users because of the smaller form factor. Little work to date has examined these differences holistically; the work that does exist has generally focused on approaches to location-based advertising. One particularly important aspect of mobile usage behavior is user content generation. Bearing this in mind, we aim to improve our understanding of device-dependent user behavior by examining differences in content generated on mobile and non-mobile devices, in the context of electronic word of mouth. We demonstrate a variety of important differences in reviews that are submitted via mobile devices; they exhibit lower and more varied star ratings, contain more concrete and emotional text, and are generally perceived as more helpful. We discuss the implications for both service providers and the management of online review platforms