Asymmetric effects of online consumer reviews

By Sangwon Park, Juan Luis Nicolau. 2015

575 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Consumers tend to seek heuristic information cues to simplify the amount of information involved in tourist decisions. Accordingly, star ratings in online reviews are a critical heuristic element of the perceived evaluation of online consumer information. The objective of this article is to assess the effect of review ratings on usefulness and enjoyment. The empirical application is carried out on a sample of 5,090 reviews of 45 restaurants in London and New York. The results show that people perceive extreme ratings (positive or negative) as more useful and enjoyable than moderate ratings, giving rise to a U-shaped line, with asymmetric effects: the size of the effect of online reviews depends on whether they are positive or negative.

Subfields: Marketing, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/97a89d870bf2a94c6a97bf50f3a4ace7b4bcacf2

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Citations in the corpus

When empathy prevents negative reviewing behavior (2019, background): “Online reviews have become an important information source with detailed and reliable information for tourists (Liu & Park, 2015; Gretzel, Fesenmaier, Lee, & Tussyadiah, 2011).”
The Interaction Effects of Online Reviews, Brand, and Price on Consumer Hotel Booking Decision Making (2020, background): “…consumers to reduce uncertainty and avoid purchase risks, and today’s consumers prefer to browse online reviews about several alternative hotels in the social media before narrowing down on a choice (Murphy and Chen 2014; S. Park and Nicolau 2015; Phillips et al. 2016; Zhang, Wu, and Mattila 2016).”
Online Review Helpfulness: Role of Qualitative Factors (2016, background): “Hence they are more likely to process non content related aspects of review such as reviewer characteristics using heuristic cues (Park and Nicolau, 2015), which may then influence, consumers’ central processing of information related to text given in online review (Petty and Cacioppo, 2012).”
Understanding user experiences of online travel review websites for hotel booking behaviours: an investigation of a dual motivation theory (2018, background): “…upon two different aspects of information process: extrinsic motivation, referring to the instrumental value of the information, and intrinsic motivation, referring to the performance of an activity for no prominent reason other than the performance itself (Deci & Ryan, 1985; Park & Nicolau, 2015).”
The role of electronic word of mouth in reducing information asymmetry: an empirical investigation of online hotel booking. (2018, background): “…2001) and the trustworthiness of eWOM (You et al., 2015); and (4) eWOM message configuration and distributional patterns, e.g., negative vs. positive eWOM (Park & Lee, 2009), extreme vs. moderate ratings (Park & Nicolau, 2015) and uneven vs. even prevalence of ratings (Chevalier & Mayzlin, 2006).”
Extremely Negative Ratings and Online Consumer Review Helpfulness: The Moderating Role of Product Quality Signals (2020, methodology): “As a result, the number of online consumer reviews has grown to the point that consumers find it difficult to retrieve the information they need to make a purchase decision (Filieri 2015; S. Park and Nicolau 2015).”
Understanding the Impact of Online Reviews on Hotel Performance (2017, background): “…empirical research has heavily focused on their impact on consumer perceptions and decision-making processes (Liu and Park 2015; Pantelidis 2010; Park and Nicolau 2015; Ryu and Han 2010; Zhang et al. 2010), but less has investigated the impact of consumer reviews on business performance…”
Consumer perceptions of information helpfulness and determinants of purchase intention in online consumer reviews of services (2018, background): “focused on review text characteristics adopted datasets of customer reviews from e-tailers, measuring review length, readability, and linguistic correctness [4, 16, 30, 38, 52, 54, 59, 62].”