What makes an online consumer review trustworthy

By Raffaele Filieri. 2016

573 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Online consumer reviews (OCRs) are increasingly used by consumers to make informed decisions about tourism-related products. However, there is an increase in concern about the level of trustworthiness of OCRs. As yet, little is known about how consumers assess trustworthiness and untrustworthiness of OCRs. This study aims to fill this gap by using a grounded theory approach based on 38 interviews with users of OCRs. Results show that consumers primarily use cues related to the message content and style and review extremity and valence to assess trustworthiness. Findings indicate that moderating variables such as consumer involvement and experience as well as the type of website affects the way consumers assess trustworthiness. Reviews perceived as untrustworthy are discounted by consumers.

Subfields: Marketing, Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/1c5736f83f45aff7167065256d0dc75439aa9999

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Citations in the corpus

Modeling consumer distrust of online hotel reviews (2018, background): “Hotel managers and hired individuals are involved in the socially undesirable practice of review manipulation (Filieri, 2016; Ma and Lee, 2014).”
When empathy prevents negative reviewing behavior (2019, background): “This asymmetric information and economic risk can be exacerbated by a reputation system that is not fully reliable (Filieri, 2016; Zervas et al., 2015), because”
“Don't Forget that Others Are Watching, Too!” The Effect of Conversational Human Voice and Reply Length on Observers’ Perceptions of Complaint Handling in Social Media (2020, background): “Consumers pay significant attention to consumergenerated content and complaints, as they are perceived to be highly credible (Filieri, 2016).”
Setting the future of digital and social media marketing research: Perspectives and research propositions (2020, methodology): “Research has established that consumers pay more attention to the credibility of the message rather than to the source (Filieri, 2016), which comes into play rarely and only for high involvement decisions.”
The influence of perceived credibility on purchase intention via competence and authenticity (2020, methodology): “For example, Filieri (2016) adopted a qualitative approach to study the various factors referring to the source, content, message framing and message order in consumers’ perception of online review trustworthiness.”
Effects of the Booking.com rating system: Bringing hotel class into the picture (2018, unknown): “Despite the plethora of studies published recently by leveraging OCRs to understand the generating factors and impact of eWOM (Banerjee & Chua, 2016; Fang et al., 2016; Filieri, 2016), the methodological issues related to the use of OCRs websites as a data source in academic hospitality and tourism ”
Positive and negative eWOM motivations and hotel customers’ eWOM behavior: Does personality matter? (2018, background): “Customers trust eWOM, the third-party information from fellow customers, more than marketer-generated information (Bickart and Schindler, 2001; Filieri, 2016).”
From desktop to destination: User-generated content platforms, co-created online experiences, destination image and satisfaction (2020, background): “Deceptive or one-sided promotional reviews can be equated to reviews that are perceived as untrustworthy, sponsored or fake (Filieri, 2016).”
Consumer perceptions of information helpfulness and determinants of purchase intention in online consumer reviews of services (2018, background): “A reviewer who is willing and capable of telling the truth is judged to be trustworthy and his/her message (review) will be accepted [21, 26, 39, 82].”
Extremely Negative Ratings and Online Consumer Review Helpfulness: The Moderating Role of Product Quality Signals (2020, background): “Research suggests that customers often use visual information to support review trustworthiness (Filieri 2016), and consumers can look at product quality signals on third-party online retailers that can help to reduce the information asymmetries they face when evaluating experience goods, such as…”