Online Reviews in B2B Markets: A Qualitative Study of Underlying Motives

While online reviews in Business-to-Consumer (B2C) and Consumer-to Consumer (C2C) markets have reached an advanced state of maturity in both academia and practice, the study of the dynamics of online reviews in the B2B market is still in its early stages. For this market, there are numerous unanswered questions concerning online reviews. The growing number of B2B review platforms and reviews makes it increasingly important to better understand the heterogeneous motives for writing online reviews for a business partner. Structured by the scales of the Motivation Sources Inventory, the literature on online reviews in the B2C market, and specifically the motivation underpinning review writing, and the characteristics of B2B review platforms, a semi-structured interview protocol is derived and presented. This research-in-progress describes the concept and proposed next steps of a qualitative study aimed at identifying the underlying motives for writing B2B online reviews

Head over Feels? Differences in Online Rating Behavior for Utilitarian and Hedonic Service Aspects

Online reviews play a considerable role in reducing the information asymmetry between sellers and potential consumers. Despite the rich body of literature on online reviews, little is known about how the chosen content of reviews influences the rating behavior. As products or services offer more than one possible evaluation characteristic, different reviews on a product or service refer to different characteristics. In our research-in-progress we investigate to what extent the valence of online ratings differs depending on whether the rating refers to utilitarian characteristic or hedonic characteristics. To answer this question, we crawled 55,601 customer reviews on Google Maps of visits to 149 German theaters and classified each review as being primarily utilitarian, hedonic, or ambiguous. For our dataset we can determine that reviews with hedonic content are on average 0.48 stars higher rated than utilitarian reviews. Our results carry substantial managerial implications for designers of review platforms and customers

A Rollercoaster of Emotions – A Semantic Analysis of Fundraising Campaigns over the Course of the Covid-19 Pandemic

Donation-based crowdfunding platforms are increasingly important for those in need, especially in times of crisis. When fundraisers face financial difficulties in addition to the original challenges underpinning their appeal, we can expect to find highly emotional textual descriptions in charitable crowdfunding campaigns. On top of any existing challenges, the COVID-19 pandemic has induced feelings of helplessness and uncertainty. Hence, we pose the question of whether, and to what extent, this pandemic has influenced the topics of donation campaigns and the emotionality expressed in them. Conducting an exploratory analysis on a dataset from GoFundMe, we combine a quantitative approach of dictionary-based sentiment analysis with exploratory topic modeling. Key findings indicate that negative emotions (i.e., negatively associated words) in the campaign descriptions have increased sharply at the onset of the pandemic, and that the topics of pandemic-related campaigns have spread from health to other aspects of life, such as personal difficulties

Reviewing the Simple Things- How Ease of Evaluation Affects Online Rating Behavior

Online reviews play a considerable role in reducing the information asymmetry between sellers and potential consumers. Despite the rich body of literature on online reviews and rating behaviors, little is known about the influence that the ease (or difficulty) involved in evaluating a product or service has on ratings. Similarly, certain product or service characteristics are easier to review and evaluate than others. In this paper we investigate the potential rating differences that arise from the ease of evaluation, both on a category and on an attribute level. In two distinct studies we analyze datasets from, respectively, Yelp (category level) and Google Maps (attribute level) and conduct linear regression with fixedeffects. Our results suggest that ratings of easy-to-evaluate product and service categories are more extreme than ratings of difficult-to-evaluate categories, whereas this does not hold for attributes. These contrasting results between category and attribute level reveal that the impact of ease of evaluation cannot be fully explained by expectation-disconfirmation theory and, therefore, we briefly discuss alternative theoretical explanations. Our results also have important practical implications for platforms offering goods and services that differ in ease of evaluation, in order to redress the biases created by these differences in rating behaviors

Timing is Everything — An Empirical Analysis of the Timing of Online Review Elicitation

Online reviews help potential customers make a more informed decision by reducing the inherent information asymmetry between sellers and buyers. One of the problems reported by the literature is, however, that reviews tend to be written by customers with more extreme experiences and expectations, biasing reviews. To address this issue, review platforms use elicitation measures, e.g. emails, to encourage greater participation and reduce this review bias. Our research examines whether the timing of email invitations influences the response rate. By analyzing a unique data set (Trusted Shops), we find that invitations sent during daytime lead to a significantly higher response rate. More specifically, we identify invitation patterns for individual time slots that are associated with a higher or a lower response rate. Our fine-grained analysis of invitation timing contributes a novel aspect to the online review literature and helps online review platform operators improve their email invitation success rates

Moment or Movement – An Empirical Analysis of the Heterogeneous Impact of Media Attention on Charitable Crowdfunding Campaigns

For issues receiving heightened media attention (e.g., natural disasters or social movements), charitable crowdfunding platforms offer an easy way of generating donations. However, since media attention is typically short-lived, little is known about the long-term impact of temporary attention spikes on donation behavior for different types of crowdfunding campaigns. To address this gap, we examine how the Black Lives Matter movement and the associated media attention after the death of George Floyd have influenced fundraising behavior for campaigns supporting the black community. By applying a differences-in-differences approach on a dataset from GoFundMe, we find that campaigns with a smaller funding goal only see an increase in donations for about one month, compared with over four months for campaigns with a larger funding goal. If charitable crowdfunding platforms aim to help smaller campaigns, they need to signpost donors to such campaigns well beyond the temporal spike in the associated media attention

”SORRY, TOO MUCH INFORMATION” DESIGNING ONLINE REVIEW SYSTEMS THAT SUPPORT INFORMATION SEARCH AND PROCESSING

Online reviews are well-known for their ability to reduce information asymmetry between sellers and buyers. However, when faced with a large number of reviews, customers can be overwhelmed by information overload. To address this problem, review systems have introduced design features intended to improve the scanning, reading and processing of online reviews. Yet, to date, we lack a comprehensive overview of these design features. Our research aims to fill this gap by consolidating the state of the art of online review system design features and develop a taxonomy for ‘information search and processing in online review systems’. To this end, we implement a rigorous taxonomy development process, and evaluate the resulting taxonomy by providing evidence of its completeness and usefulness. We contribute to literature and practice by introducing a new taxonomy which provides a first overview of design features of online review systems