Avoiding the dark side of positive online consumer reviews: Enhancing reviews' usefulness for high risk-averse travelers

By Luis Vicente Casaló, Carlos Flavián, Miguel Guinaliu, Y. Ekinci. 2015

206 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The influence of positive online consumer reviews on a traveler's decision making remains unclear. To better understand the perceived usefulness of online reviews, this study conducts two experiments using positive and negative online consumer reviews. Study results suggest that high risk-averse travelers find negative online reviews more useful than positive reviews. For positive online reviews, high-risk averse travelers feel expert reviewers' postings, travel product pictures, and well-known brand names enhance usefulness of the positive online reviews. These findings offer interesting implications for both marketing theory and practice.

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

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/4444b95179254be3f4fd747d553c257a5bf378e5

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Marketing

1. Roland Schegg
2. Eran Manes
3. Stuart J. Barnes
4. Anat Tchetchik
5. Krystin Zigan
6. Paul Phillips

In Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management

1. Stuart J. Barnes

In Sociology and Political Science

1. Roland Schegg
2. Eran Manes
3. Stuart J. Barnes
4. Anat Tchetchik
5. Krystin Zigan
6. Paul Phillips
7. Richard T. Vidgen

Citations in the corpus

• Understanding the Impact of Online Reviews on Hotel Performance (2017, background): “…and Prendergast 2009), negative reviews are stronger, more influential, and difficult to resist than positive reviews (Baumeister et al. 2001; Casalo et al. 2015; Chevalier and Mayzlin 2006; Cui, Lui, and Guo 2012; Maheswaran and Meyers-Levy 1990; Papathanassis and Knolle 2011) and hence…”
• The role of electronic word of mouth in reducing information asymmetry: an empirical investigation of online hotel booking. (2018, background): “…2006) and product's durability, trialability and observability (You et al., 2015); (2) Consumer characteristics, e.g., gender and income (Gopinath, Chintagunta, & Venkataraman, 2013), level of risk-aversion (Casaló et al., 2015), and susceptibility to reviewers' ratings (Bao & Chang, 2014).”