Online Consumer Reviews

‘Sharing economy’ platforms such as Airbnb have recently given rise to new
travel trends in which electronic word of mouth and interpersonal contact
are central. This study examines 90 positive reviews, with a threefold objective: first, analyse what makes Airbnb a social platform; second, understand online/offline rapport enhancement prior to and during the Airbnb experience; and third, examine the main rapport enhancement strategies in users’ evaluations. The results show that while reviewers place great importance on transactional wants before the experience, during face-to-face contact sociality rights become more important. After the Airbnb experience, however, the main rapport strategies point to enhancing the addressee’s face, while identity is constantly co-constructed. The present study intends to bring to the fore the function of positive rapport in the Airbnb experience, in an online system in which the management of communicative skills may be the main tool for success – or failure.

This research extends prior research examining the factors appearing in published online reviews and how this information is used by consumer to make purchasing decisions. The study examined reviews published on Yelp.com (N=600) in two U.S. cities. The study examined the overall tone of the review and the topics discussed – price, service, cleanliness, cost, food quality and star rating along with characteristics of the individual reviewer. Each of these variables were then examined to see what factors were judged by readers to be the most important measures when deciding to pick or reject a particular restaurant. The study found customers are influenced by the tone and length of the review, but also pay attention to reviewer characteristics such as gender, social activity and number of reviews the author has published when evaluating a particular restaurant.

Addresses one of the fundamental issues of e-marketing. How the elements like reviews, ratings and blogs affect the online consumer behavior. Analyses of the factors affecting the online consumer behavior and examines how e-marketers can influence the outcome of the virtual interaction and the buying process for the consumers.
The factors which impact the modern consumer and their behavior have identified in this report. It shows and compares the old fundamentals and framework of marketing with the modern elements. The study of various scholars and research report is done to compute the framework for Factors Influencing Online Consumer Behavior.
The research explains the need of updating and modifying the frameworks for better understanding of the e-market and e-commerce sites. These e-markets have easy and fast buying process and has different online consumer behavior model as to satisfy the dynamic and frequently updating digital platforms and websites.

With the aim of enhancing their online reputation, several hospitality businesses have started soliciting their guests to write online reviews. Available studies have not yet evaluated the effects of this strategy. To fill this knowledge gap, this study draws on the theory of psychological reactance and investigates guests' attitudinal and behavioral reactions to received solicitations. Evidence collected from a sample of Italian travelers indicates that soliciting reviews has both benefits and drawbacks: It increases the number of reviews for the business, but it also irritates a significant share of guests. Particularly high levels of irritation arise when a business explicitly asks its guests to write positive reviews. The implications of these findings for the reputation management strategy of hospitality businesses are discussed.

Purpose. Accommodation sharing is a major trend shaping the hospitality industry, and Airbnb is the most prominent sharing platform driving this growth. While price convenience is reported as one of the main strengths of Airbnb accommodations, only a few studies have examined price determinants. In particular, it is unclear whether hosts dynamically adjust prices for shared accommodation based on their experience with price management and on the level of market demand. This paper intends to fill this gap by suggesting and testing a comprehensive hedonic pricing model.
Methodology. Data from all 1,056 Airbnb listings for accommodations available in the city of Verona (Italy) on four booking dates in 2016 are collected and analysed through regression analysis.
Findings. The results highlight that price is significantly related to the level of the host’s accumulated experience and to the level of market demand on a specific booking date. The findings provide support for the ability of hosts to dynamically adjust prices for their accommodations.
Practical implications. Drawing on the innovator’s dilemma theory, this study suggests some strategies that traditional hotels may adopt to react to the disruptive nature of Airbnb.
Originality/value. This is one of the few studies to address hosts’ pricing strategies and to specifically consider price adjustments owing to variations in host experience and market demand.

This research aims to identify the antecedents and consequents of trust in the product review blogs in an emerging market, which possess different characteristics than developed markets. We adopt the definition of product review blogs (PRB) as those blogs, websites, or social networking pages that disseminate experiences and/ or information about products and services. We propose a model that incorporates individual characteristics and beliefs as antecedents of trust in the PRB and behavioral intentions as its consequence. Next, we conduct a questionnaire with 407 Brazilians who follow any PRB. We analyzed the data using structural equation modeling with partial least squares estimation (PLS-SEM). The results demonstrate the influence of trust in the PRB on users’ purchase intention, intention to follow blog recommendations, and intention to continue participating in the blog in an expressive emerging market. The trust in the PRB tends to have the PRB credibility as an antecedent. The findings suggest that subjective knowledge directly affects trust in the PRB and indirectly affects trust through PRB credibility, a mediating variable in the relationship between these variables. Our results reveal a direct and negative effect on PRB trust regarding susceptibility to informational influence. However, we also identify an indirect positive impact on trust in the PRB through PRB credibility. The results allow us to conclude that PRB credibility plays a central role in the antecedents of trust in the PRB in emerging markets.

While the proliferation of online review websites facilitate travellers' ability to obtain information (decrease in search costs), it makes it difficult for them to process and judge useful information (increase in cognitive costs). Accordingly, this study attempts to identify the factors affecting the perceived usefulness of online consumer reviews by investigating two aspects of online information: (1) the characteristics of review providers, such as the disclosure of personal identity, the reviewer's expertise and reputation, and (2) reviews themselves including quantitative (i.e., star ratings and length of reviews) and qualitative measurements (i.e., perceived enjoyment and review readability). The results reveal that a combination of both messenger and message characteristics positively affect the perceived usefulness of reviews. In particular, qualitative aspects of reviews were identified as the most influential factors that make travel reviews useful. The implications of these findings contribute to tourism and hospitality marketers to develop more effective social media marketing.

The purpose of this exploratory study is to highlight perceptions of 3 Botanic Gardens across the UK as visitor attractions; in order to develop a model for managers to use for understanding and developing place making of Botanic Gardens. The study serves to inform and develop marketing and operational management outputs. Analysis of 586 online reviews, comments and perceptions from 2007 to 2017 follows qualitative methodology techniques utilising a combination of manual and automatic text analysis. On the whole there are positive sentiments toward the BGs. Greater volume of reviews were highlighted across 2 of the BGs with the other needing to develop communications and online resources and presence. Key findings revealed the need for these 3 BGs to strengthen public perception of their importance and value. These insights, although focused on BGs can be applied to a range of gazes across other visitor attractions, places and spaces.

Pandemi COVID-19 mendorong peningkatan penjualan produk-produk kesehatan seperti masker, handsanitizer, obat-obatan dan lain-lain. Sebagai pemimpin pasar e-marketplace yang sedang berkembang di Indonesia, Shopee menyediakan fitur online consumer review dan rating pada platformnya. Penelitian ini bertujuan untuk menganalisis pengaruh online consumer review dan rating terhadap minat beli produk kesehatan pada e-marketplace Shopee selama masa pandemi COVID-19 di Jabodetabek. Penarikan sampel dilakukan dengan teknik purposive sampling. Metode yang digunakan dalam penelitian ini adalah analisis deskriptif dan SEM-PLS, dengan responden sebanyak 191 orang. Hasil analisis menunjukkan variabel online consumer review dan rating berpengaruh positif dan signifikan terhadap minat beli produk kesehatan dengan variabel rating memiliki pengaruh lebih dominan.

The Florida Tampa Electric Company's Manatee Viewing Center (MVC) and its fossil-fuelled Big Bend power plant are separated by a narrow ship channel that serves as state and federal sanctuary for threatened Florida Manatees. As humans have destroyed much of their warm spring habitat, many manatees are forced to rely on power plant hot water effluent to survive during cold winter months. Visitors' reactions to the MVC are every bit as incongruous as a massive greenhouse gas pollutant source enabling a wildlife reserve. Notwithstanding its inescapable presence, visitor reviews of the MVC nearly uniformly ignore the immense power plant. We offer this study of online reviews of the MVC to examine how and why everyday people's interactions are fundamental to making dominant practices of anthropogenic ecological destruction unremarkable and, therefore, unfixable. Specifically, we argue the collective blindness reflected in the findings of this study exemplifies a broader sociocultural tendency to articulate and reinforce spaces of ecological "invisibility." In such spaces, our quotidian practices and discourses play a central role in enabling collective environmental inattention and environmental inaction, especially when we are confronted with places in which the constructed binary between human and "natural" realms spectacularly collapses.

The online reviews have a pivotal role in electronic purchasing decision making, both from the perspective of consumers and commercial players. A corpus of 700 reviews under the categories "Electronics" and "Clothing" extracted from Amazon.com from January 2010 to July 2014 was analyzed to construct online reviews as a genre, both for its application in future studies and for its commercial use in the industry. The current study found that the online reviews of the corpus are predominantly positive testimonies which are built as general truths. They focus on positive aspects, such as the advantages and the reaffirmation of the buying decision made and are able to reinforce online reviews users' purchase intention. They are the projected experience of an enunciated self and their personal story with the products. They have spontaneous effects and transfer informal aspects of close and conversational spaces to an unknown larger audience. This instantaneous effect, which results in spontaneity, pretends that there are no interests involved, that the poster contributes to the community with statements that are not formal or professional. That is, they reduce the perceived risk of the users by migrating from a seller discourse to an altruistic peer-to-peer guidance, reinforced by not directly interpellating the figure of the enunciatee. In addition, the words and expressions of numerosity operated like deictics, and generated experience anchors with their neutral references. The terms of numerosity apart from turning tangible objects and have a high descriptive potential, they were e-commerce pointers of experience, precise affirmations, and reduced the risk of trusting on online reviews. This combination of findings provides some support for the conceptual premise that online reviews operate as social markers of e-commerce interfaces. The online reviews have a pivotal role in electronic purchasing decision making, both from the perspective of consumers and commercial players. A corpus of 700 reviews under the categories "Electronics" and "Clothing" extracted from Amazon.com from January 2010 to July 2014 was analyzed to construct online reviews as a genre, both for its application in future studies and for its commercial use in the industry. The current study found that the online reviews of the corpus are predominantly positive testimonies which are built as general truths. They focus on positive aspects, such as the advantages and the reaffirmation of the buying decision made and are able to reinforce online reviews users' purchase intention. They are the projected experience of an enunciated self and their personal story with the products. They have spontaneous effects and transfer informal aspects of close and conversational spaces to an unknown larger audience. This instantaneous effect, which results in spontaneity, pretends that there are no interests involved, that the poster contributes to the community with statements that are not formal or professional. That is, they reduce the perceived risk of the users by migrating from a seller discourse to an altruistic peer-to-peer guidance, reinforced by not directly interpellating the figure of the enunciatee. In addition, the words and expressions of numerosity operated like deictics, and generated experience anchors with their neutral references. The terms of numerosity apart from turning tangible objects and have a high descriptive potential, they were e-commerce pointers of experience, precise affirmations, and reduced the risk of trusting on online reviews. This combination of findings provides some support for the conceptual premise that online reviews operate as social markers of e-commerce interfaces.

This dissertation investigates how businesses are able to align the collective actions of a disconnected crowd with the strategic goals of the organization. I examined this questions within the context of the business review website Yelp through a quantitative analysis of nearly 60,000 business reviews, 17 in-depth qualitative interviews with reviewers, and a two-year ethnography. Interpreting the results of this data within the framework of the collective action space (Bimber, Flanagin, & Stohl, 2012) indicates that Yelp is able to manage the contributions of a relatively small subset of reviewers through the Yelp Elite Squad. Rather than simply motivating more reviews, the Elite Squad encouraged reviewers to interact more personally with other reviewers and accept increased institutional engagement with Yelp. In encouraging members of the crowd to produce online reviews within this context, Yelp was able to use organizational culture as a control strategy for encouraging Elite reviewers to adopt a pre-mediated reviewing approach to their reviews. This increased the frequency of moderate reviews and decreased the frequency of extreme reviews. This behavior ultimately furthers the organizational goals of Yelp, as moderate reviews are considered to be more helpful for reviews of businesses. Finally, implications for crowdsourcing, big data analysis, and theory are discussed.

Mobile application software, or as it called in the era of smartphones “apps”, is a growing market, which has attracted the attention of both the entrepreneurs and academics. This relatively new product category is almost a decade old and is accessed mainly through the application distribution platforms that are called “app stores”. These platforms provide a sum of information about the app products that consist of internal information from the developers as well as information from users. This paper focuses on the latter, on the normative and informational characteristics of review comments, as they are filtered through positive and negative valence, to provide help to the customers on their process of purchase decision. For this purpose, a survey through an online questionnaire based on Dual Process Theory was conducted and its findings provide information for marketing related decisions about mobile app products.

In this study, we conducted a multilevel analysis of factors affecting customer satisfaction in the global hotel industry. The survey data collected from TripAdvisor.com included customer reviews relating to 13,410 hotels located in 80 major global urban tourism destinations. We examined multiple relevant factors at each of the following five levels of analysis: (a) service encounter, (b) visitor, (c) visitor’s nationality, (d) hotel, and (e) destination. The results show that hotel attributes and the personal characteristics of visitors most powerfully influence customer satisfaction. However, the purpose of the trip, the characteristics of the destination, and the visitor’s nationality are also found to play an important role in hotel evaluation. By integrating multiple levels of analysis into a single statistical model, multilevel modeling framework enables researchers and professionals to see the “big picture” of factors affecting customer satisfaction in the contemporary hotel industry.

Fake online book reviews, where authors and 'review factories' secretly pay writers to review products and services, are an increasing concern for consumer protection regulators worldwide. This study uses Rhetorical Structure Theory to analyze a forensic collection of authentic and fake Amazon book reviews drawn from a Deceptive Review corpus to test the potential for the application of discourse coherence analysis to the specific task of developing linguistic heuristics for spotting fake reviews and to the general area of linguistic deception detection. The study introduces a theory of genre violation to explain deception in reviews, highlights the deceptive pragmatics and discourse strategies of paid review writers and confirms the utility of RST in forensic linguistic contexts.

Online travel reviews are paramount to trip planning because they help consumers' form images of destinations. Despite ample studies on hotel service attributes, knowledge is scarce regarding culturally nuanced attributes, including security perceptions. This study examines consumers' perceptions of service attributes and security/safety concerns of hotels in Africa. Data were extracted from three hotel categories (3, 4, and 5-stars), which were based on TripAdvisor rankings from Egypt, Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, and South Africa. A hybrid analysis revealed that hotel service attributes and security/safety are cardinal evaluation criteria for visitors to Africa. Additionally, our study reveals that most negative reviews were from 5-star hotels and Egypt received more positive reviews in all the service attributes than other countries.

A b S T R A C T In this article, the authors offer a comparative approach to the analysis of a popular internet genre – user-generated restaurant reviews – sampled from two different websites (OpenRice and Yelp), which have emerged from two different geographic contexts (Hong Kong and the US). Their investigation reveals both similarities and differences of in terms of review format, content discussed and the use of several semiotic resources, such as the posting of photographs, the use of emoticons and emoji, and the expressive use of orthography and punctuation. The authors demonstrate that, while many of the formal properties of the genre are quite similar, some variations in review content may reflect underlying cultural differences. Furthermore, they show not only how the website's architecture can either constrain or encourage the use (or non-use) of particular semiotic resources, but also suggest that other variables (i.e. orthographic systems, review community norms) may interact with medium factors. k e y W O R D S multimodality • online reviews • restaurant reviews • user-generated content • website interface

Critical sociology suggests that taste judgments are not independent of the social, as actors use them to claim social value. This article demonstrates that this critical perspective has gained currency among laypersons, transforming everyday struggles over cultural evaluation. I discuss the new discursive category ‘farterism’, which emerged in Israel in the 1990s to denounce vain pretence and became ubiquitous in everyday evaluation. I analyse online user-generated reviews on films and restaurants alongside broadsheet newspaper articles to explore how this category is used in different contexts by different actors, which aesthetic surface characteristics are most associated with it and why, and how farterism critique reshapes the relationship between lay judgments and established market (prices) and field/art-world (status) hierarchies. Farterism critique is often used to fend off symbolic violence, but cultural elites use it too, despite their interest. I discuss the implicit ethic behind farterism critique, and its connections with recent transformations of capitalism.

This study explores the potential of a theory of discourse coherence relations to distinguish between truth and deception. It uses Rhetorical Structure Theory and logistic regression to build a deception model that achieves 78% accuracy on a sample of gold-standard Amazon book reviews drawn from the Deceptive Review corpus. It finds Contrast discourse relations to be a significant predictor of veracity and successfully tests a discourse mining method for their semi-automated extraction. These preliminary findings contribute to the development of a linguistic-based theory that can guide the design of computer-aided deception detection systems.

Introducción. Las recomendaciones sobre productos que pueden encontrarse en Internet se han convertido en una importante fuente de información y en un apoyo para la decisión de compra. La cantidad, diversidad y accesibilidad  de las opiniones online han contribuido a su atractivo y popularidad. El eWOM ha cambiado el modo en que los consumidores interactúan unos con otros así como el modo en el que compran productos y servicios. Metodología. Este artículo investiga el modo en que los jóvenes universitarios de la UPV/EHU utilizan y evalúan opiniones anónimas de Internet. Las técnicas utilizadas han sido de tipo cualitativo (tres focus groups) y cuantitativo (cuestionario auto-administrado).Resultados y conclusiones. Las conclusiones de este estudio nos han permitido describir el proceso de evaluación que los jóvenes siguen cuando buscan opiniones de otros usuarios en Internet. También nos han permitido señalar cuáles son los tipos de opiniones que tienen más posibilidades de llamar su atención y condicionar sus decisiones.

Introduction. Online reviews of products and services have become an important source of information and assistance in consumers’ buying decision-making processes. The amount, diversity and accessibility of online reviews have contributed to their appeal and popularity. Electronic word of mouth (eWOM) has changed the way consumers interact with each other as well as the way in which they buy products and services. Methods. This article aims to characterise the way in which students from the University of the Basque Country use and evaluate anonymous online reviews. To achieve this objective qualitative and quantitative methods have been used: three focus groups and a large-scale online survey. Results and conclusions. The results of this study have allowed us to describe the evaluation process young people follow when they consult online reviews and to identify the types of reviews that are more likely to catch the attention of young internet users and influence their decisions.

Purpose of the paper: Social couponing campaigns are becoming increasingly popular among hotels. However, while their short-term impacts have been assessed, their medium and long-term benefits for the hotels' reputation have not been measured yet. The purpose of this study is to provide evidence of the potential of social couponing to stimulate positive electronic word‐of‐mouth (eWOM) and online referrals to hotels. In addition, this research intends to identify the factors related to the design and management of the couponing campaign, which influence the couponers' willingness to engage in positive eWOM and referrals. Methodology: The study is based on the content analysis of 564 TripAdvisor reviews posted by guests that have stayed at 76 Italian hotels using a Groupon's coupon. Both frequency and co-occurrence analysis are performed. Findings: The results show that social couponing stimulates intense positive eWOM and referrals. The analysis also highlights the most important coupon-related factors, which are able to influence the valence (positive vs. negative) of the eWOM. Research limits: The small sample of hotels, considered in this research and the specific features of the Italian hotel industry suggest caution in generalizing the results to other settings. Practical Implications: Hotel managers should design and manage their couponing campaigns carefully considering several factors, identified by this study, which directly stimulate positive eWOM. The findings of this research also suggest that hotel managers could use couponing campaigns as effective tools for their online reputation management strategies. Originality of the paper: This paper provides empirical evidence of the eWOM and referral effects of social couponing. Hence, it complements previous studies, which have mostly considered the short-term effects of social couponing related to sales increase.

We examine the generic structure and rhetorical relations that characterise online book reviews in English, Japanese and Chinese to describe the pragmatic features of this emerging genre in a contrastive light. The corpus we analyse contains online book reviews written by consumers for consumers. The purpose of the study is two-fold. First, we seek to identify the generic structure of online book reviews. Second, we investigate the cross-cultural variation in the rhetorical organisation of opinions and evaluations in written reviews across language communities. The reviews are analysed in terms of the generic stages of book reviews, which are determined by their overall communicative goals (Motta-Roth, 1995; Taboada, 2011). The stages are then mapped against rhetorical relations that capture the coherence and meaningful organisation of the text (Mann and Thompson, 1988). Results show that online book reviews in all three languages share a common generic structure comprising three broad stages: Metapragmatic Comment, Evaluation (Book Overall, Author, Plot, Character) and Recommendation. While Evaluation is the only obligatory stage, Metapragmatic Comment serves to prepare the reader for the Evaluation that follows. The recommendation stage is common in both English and Chinese reviews but is conspicuously absent in their Japanese counterpart. In terms of rhetorical patterns, Contrast, Concession and Antithesis relations are preferred in Metapragmatic Comment and Evaluation, while Motivation is typically present in the recommendation stage. This paper proposes a methodology for the contrastive analyses of pragmatic phenomena, illustrating this methodology through the study of an emerging online genre.

The purpose of this exploratory study is to highlight perceptions of 3 Botanic Gardens across the UK as visitor attractions; in order to develop a model for managers to use for understanding and developing place making of Botanic Gardens. The study serves to inform and develop marketing and operational management outputs. Analysis of 586 online reviews, comments and perceptions from 2007 to 2017 follows qualitative methodology techniques utilising a combination of manual and automatic text analysis. On the whole there are positive sentiments toward the BGs. Greater volume of reviews were highlighted across 2 of the BGs with the other needing to develop communications and online resources and presence. Key findings revealed the need for these 3 BGs to strengthen public perception of their importance and value. These insights, although focused on BGs can be applied to a range of gazes across other visitor attractions, places and spaces.