In the spirit of disseminating our latest edition of the manager response to online reviews paper, Alex and I have posted the current manuscript to SSRN for those who are interested. Let us know your thoughts via email.
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2831402
Abstract:
This manuscript investigates the externalities of managers’ responses (MR) to online reviews on popular travel websites. Specifically, we examine the effect of publicly responding to customers’ reviews on subsequent reviewer ratings. We find that manager responses to negative reviews (MR-N) can significantly influence subsequent opinion in a positive way if those responses are \textit{observable} at the time of reviewing. Interestingly, we find this externality to be negative for manager responses to positive reviews (MR-P). We conduct a topic analysis on review texts and corresponding manager responses to study the moderating role of tailoring on sentiment externalities of MR to subsequent reviews. We show that tailored MR-P increases the negative impact on subsequent opinion. The results from our text analysis suggest that the difference in direction of MR-P versus MR-N externalities on subsequent reviewer ratings stem from reviewers’ psychological reactance to MR-P. By highlighting specific positive elements of a review, managers’ intent for responding is brought into question as they take advantage of reviewers’ positive feedback to promote their hotel.
Dr. Yang Wang 