Yes / Consumers use online reviews to help make informed purchase decisions. This paper extends existing research by examining how content of online reviews influences perceptions of helpfulness by demonstrating how different emotions can influence helpfulness of both product and service online reviews beyond a valence-based approach using cognitive appraisal theory and attribution theory. This research contributes to existing knowledge regarding the theory of information processing, attribution theory, and cognitive appraisal theory of emotions. Using findings from this study, practitioners can make review websites more user-friendly which will help readers avoid information overload and make more informed purchase decisions.

Before making a purchase, more and more consumers in recent years are consulting other consumers¡¦ product reviews online, to assist them in making a purchasing decision. However, due to the massive amount of online reviews, consumers can hardly get useful information effectively. Hence, information overload has become a problem. Query functions in search engines like Yahoo and Google can help users find some of the reviews that they need for specific information. Nevertheless, the returned pages from these search engines are still beyond the visual capacity of humans. Therefore, this study aims to develop a new concept of personalized recommendation based on consumer product reviews to solve the afore-mentioned problem. A series of laboratory experiment examines the effectiveness of the proposed approach and compares this approach with other traditional approaches on precision of recommendation. Meanwhile, the meaning of the recommendation behind each approach is explained. Lastly, the prototype of recommendation system based on the proposed approach is illustrated. Our system can display the trend of the gathered consumer reviews in a graphical way, such as a product satisfaction run chart. The development of recommendation systems is not only beneficial to consumers, but also advantageous to sellers.

This research aims to investigate the (1) review effects on consumer decision making process, (2) effects of negative reviews on brand equity, and (3) consumers' likely response to a brand's request for reviews. The objective of the first essay is to investigate the nature of the relationship between skepticism and consumer decision making in an online behavior context. Its second objective is to know whether people's belief on their abilities or their hedonic principle moderates the relationship between a person's skepticism toward online reviews and their reliance on online reviews. The objective of the second essay is to explore whether negative online reviews that focus on service quality specific dimensions have a different effect on a service organization's perceived brand equity. Its second objective is to analyze the role of emotional contagion in the relationship between negative reviews related to various service quality dimensions and its effect on perceived brand equity. The main objective of the third essay is to know whether consumers are more likely to write an online review for a brand when the request comes from a higher equity brand. This essay also investigates how message trust and persuasion knowledge influence the relationship between a brand's request to write online reviews and the likelihood of consumers to write reviews. These three essays altogether contribute to the online review and the brand equity literature by providing new insights about the intricate relationship between online reviews, brand equity, and consumer decision-making.

Given the tremendous impact of online reviews on consumer choice, responding to online word of mouth (WOM) has become an important channel for firms to engage the consumers. This thesis investigates how firms can proactively respond to online product reviews to engage customers and manage customer relationships. In Study One, based upon the data of hotel reviews on Tripadvisor.com, I propose that responding by firms differ in three aspects, namely frequency, speed, and the amount of information, and these metrics exert significant influence on subsequent consumes’ WOM engagement, hotel rankings, and votes of usefulness of the reviews. Moreover, in contrast to responding to positive reviews, responding to negative reviews greatly affects consumption decisions given the negativity bias among consumers. Thus, the subsequent two studies examine whether responding help to alleviate the detrimental impact of negative reviews. Drawing from the literature on crisis management, service failure recovery, Study Two posits that sellers’ responses to negative WOM can be categorized as defensive and accommodative. Further, whether accommodative or defensive responding is more effective depends upon the nature of NWOM, namely regular NWOM or product failure. Based on the results of a between-subject experiment, Study Two provides evidence for the asymmetric impact of accommodative versus defensive responding. When confronting regular NWOM, defensive response outperforms accommodative response or no response, whereas accommodative response is superior to defensive response or no response when coping with a service failure. Further, based on the attribution of negative reviews, a moderated mediation effect is found. To enhance the external validity and robustness of these findings, Study Three provides econometric evidence that the relative effectiveness of accommodative vs defensive response on subsequent consumers’ evaluation of their consumption experience. Upon analyzing the hotels’ responses on Tripadvisor.com, responding can be a double-edged sword in that it works only when seller takes the appropriate responding strategies. In particular, the higher proportion of accommodative responses (defensive responses) for product failure reviews (regular negative reviews), the higher the subsequent consumers’ satisfaction. However, responding can backfire when the proportion of defensive responses (accommodative responses) for product failure (regular negative reviews) is high. To recapitulate, this thesis identifies whether and how online responding influences consumer experiences on social media. These research findings can help firms formulate effective responding strategies to take advantage of social media’s unique ability to engage customers and improve consumer satisfaction and loyalty.

Electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM) has increasingly become an important topic in marketing and consumer research. However, theory construction and methodology development in this area are still in their infancy. This leaves some basic and important questions unanswered including whether eWOM communication is effective, what roles are played by different communication cues, and how valuable information from text reviews can be generated. This study intends to answer these fundamental questions.Based on the Brunswik's Len Model, this study developed the Process Model of eWOM Communication. It extends the Brunswik's Lens Model in several important ways and provides a systematic tool to examine the effectiveness of eWOM communication processes. Furthermore, a simplified model of eWOM communication was developed to test the validity of automatic text analysis as a promising tool in studying eWOM communication.Two focus group interviews and a throughout literature review were conducted first to identify the communication cues employed by eWOM partners. Then, two web-based self-administered surveys were carried out to collect data from both eWOM senders and readers. Last, the data from both eWOM senders and readers were matched, forming a final dataset with 90 reviews. Correlations, regressions, and path analyses were employed to evaluate the models and test the hypotheses.Results showed that eWOM communication is effective, and the relative strength of information flow varies in different eWOM communication links when communicating different types of information.This study identified a list of eWOM communication cues and found that consumers employ different cues in communicating different types of information. EWOM readers' inference structure in decoding may not exactly mirror eWOM senders' encoding structure. Moreover, communication cues especially verbal cues play an important role in eWOM communication and explain additional variance in eWOM partners' intentions and perceptions beyond and above the star ratings. In general, negative emotion words are the most important cues across various situations.In addition, this study provides initial evidence for the validity of automatic text analysis in studying eWOM. Linguistic indicators such as Negations, Negative Emotions, and Money can explain additional variance in eWOM partners' attitudes and emotions beyond and above the star ratings.

Online product reviews have become an important and influential source of information for consumers. Firms often manipulate online product reviews to influence consumer perceptions about the product, making it a research topic of urgent need for theory development and empirical investigation. In this thesis, we examine how consumers perceive and respond to the three commonly used manipulation tactics. Firstly, an exploratory pre-study via in-depth interviews with online shoppers indicates that consumers commonly have the knowledge for online review manipulations as well as for detecting them. In the first study, a survey was used to investigate the three popular manipulation tactics in terms of ethicality and deceptiveness. They rated hiding/deleting unfavorable messages as the most deceptive and unethical, followed by anonymously adding positive messages, and then offering incentives for posting favorable messages. In study 2, in a simulated field experiment, we introduce persuasion knowledge to further examine the negative influence of review manipulations on consumers’ attitudes. The results suggest that review manipulation increases suspicion of manipulations but can hardly reduce purchase intention of focal products. We also find that consumers’ persuasion knowledge enhances suspicion of manipulation, but lessens the negative impact of suspicion on purchase intention. The third study uses secondary data of a branded e-retailer and its third party website to cross-validate the effect of manipulations on product sales. The results confirm our hypotheses that review manipulation are effective in promoting sales; however, this influence would decrease over time. This research contributes to the online marketing literature by augmenting the Information Manipulation Theory and Persuasion Knowledge Model to examine the deceptive persuasion in the online context and its impact on consumer behavior. Furthermore, we also contribute to the literature of online WOM by empirically examining the influence of review manipulations on sales. Our findings provide valuable insights to practitioners and policy makers on the pitfalls of online manipulation activities and the need to ensure the healthy development of e-commerce.

Recent technological developments have changed the lifestyle of people around the world. The business sector is not an exception, and companies frequently adjust to such changes by investing in their online presence. Furthermore, the internet provides consumers with different channels to find and share their purchase experiences, and such digital interactions result in bringing forth the electronic word of mouth (eWOM). Although eWOM is an essential aspect of the overall marketing mix of modern firms, its research is heavily limited to the developed world. Thus, a qualitative study of 10 millennials from Pakistan was designed to understand how three eWOM components, i.e., Valence, Channels, and Length, affect consumer purchase intentions. The data was collected through semi-structured online interviews, and the findings show that each component has a significant impact on purchase intentions. The result confirms factors such as communicator credibility, trustworthiness, and Valence ratio as essential characteristics of the eWOM components. This study contributes to further understanding of global consumers and help companies to identify eWOM components useful for promoting and selling their products in the Pakistani market.

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Travel bragging, referring to the act of showing off or boasting about travel experiences, is ubiquitous on social media; travel bragging rights (e.g., Instagrammability) have become an important factor in travel decision-making in the social media era. Despite these developments, research on travel bragging remains scarce. This dissertation presents two studies. The first aimed to explore travel bragging via qualitative approaches (i.e., in-depth interviews, means-end analysis, and photo elicitation) to determine how consumers (both braggers and the audience) defined and perceived travel bragging and travel bragging rights. This study provided a systematic conceptualization of travel bragging, including a definition of the term, how to distinguish travel bragging from travel experience sharing, motivations behind travel bragging, the influence of travel bragging on travel braggers and their audience, and coping strategies consumers used to mitigate the negative impacts of travel bragging. This conceptualization of travel bragging highlighted perception gaps between travel braggers and the audience in identifying travel bragging, motivations behind this behavior, and the audience’s emotional reactions to it. The first study also provided a conceptual framework of travel bragging rights, which includes seven dimensions related to destination attributes: difference, similarity, scarcity, functionality, symbolism, hedonism, and consequentiality. Results show that, as a travel motivation, seeking travel bragging rights exerts a stronger influence on young generations and active social media content generators. The second study sought to investigate travel bragging in an online travel review context using an experimental design. Drawing on attribution theory and the emotional contagion effect, this study attempted to identify whether two visual cues in user-generated photos (pictorial self-prominence and selfies) could affect the persuasion effect of online reviews through perceived dubious motivations and positive emotions. Pictorial self-prominence (i.e., the degree to which the image of oneself is noticeable from user-generated photos) is a new concept introduced in this study. It was manipulated in two ways: the ratio of the area of one’s image to a whole self-portrait, and the ratio of the number of photos including the reviewer’s image to the total number of photos uploaded per online review. Results show that pictorial self-prominence has a negative impact on review helpfulness through perceived dubious motivations; however, this effect did not extend to visit intention to the tourist attraction mentioned in the online review. The findings also show that pictorial self-prominence (manipulated by number ratio) and selfie had a significant interaction effect on review helpfulness, such that when more photos contained the reviewer’s image, online reviews with selfies were perceived as more helpful than those with non-selfies. Follow-up analysis revealed that this interaction effect was mediated by perceived authenticity and perceived source expertise. Theoretically, this dissertation presents a systematic and comprehensive conceptualization of travel bragging, including travel bragging behavior and travel bragging rights. This conceptualization provides an update to consumers’ opinions about travel bragging and travel bragging rights in the social media era. This work also contributes to the word-of-mouth literature by uncovering the influences of travel bragging and underlying mechanisms. In addition, this dissertation reveals the influences of pictorial self-prominence and selfies on review helpfulness, highlighting the importance of visual cues in online word of mouth. Managerially, findings regarding travel bragging and travel bragging rights offer important implications for destination marketing organizations and associated social media marketers. The dissertation also outlines a series of tactful self-presentation strategies for individuals who enjoy bragging about or sharing travel experiences on social media while avoiding being perceived negatively. In addition, findings from the first study call for attention from policy makers to the negative psychological effects of travel bragging on travel braggers and the audience. The study on pictorial self-prominence and selfies provides important implications for destination marketers’ visual marketing strategies. / Tourism and Sport

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