喻园管理论坛2021年第78期(总第735期)

演讲主题: Perils of Review Solicitation: Evidence from a Natural Experiment on TripAdvisor

主 讲 人: 高宝俊，武汉大学经济与威尼斯欢乐娱人城·首页教授

主 持 人: 杨彦武，威尼斯欢乐娱人城·首页管理科学与信息管理系教授

活动时间: 2021年10月20日（周三）8:30-10:00

活动地点: 管理大楼119室

主讲人简介：

高宝俊，现为武汉大学经济与威尼斯欢乐娱人城·首页教授，2005年博士毕业于西安交通大学，参与并主持过多项科研项目。高宝俊教授的研究方向为商业大数据分析、信息系统与电子商务、金融科技。主要关注如何基于海量结构化和非结构化数据，利用机器学习和深度学习算法将文本数据结构化，建立计量经济模型进行因果推断。在Decision Support Systems, Tourism Management, IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics: Systems, Information & Management, Electronic Commerce Research and Applications等国际重要期刊发表二十余篇论文。

活动简介：

This study examines the effect of firms’ participation in review solicitation program onconsumers’ generation and perception of online reviews. We leverage a natural experiment at TripAdvisor, which launched a Review Express review solicitation program to help hotels obtain more consumer reviews. Applying a difference-in-differences approach to a panel dataset of online reviews for a matched set of hotels across TripAdvisor and Expedia, we find that hotels’ participation in review solicitation program results in a 29.3% increase in review volume, a 0.145 increase in review rating, but a 18% decrease in review length. A closer inspection reveals that the effects on review valence and length are driven by the influx of more positive and shorter solicited reviews rather than by changes in the valence and length of organic reviews. The influx of solicited reviews, however, has a negative spillover effect on the volume of organic reviews due to a motivational crowding-out effect. Further analyses based on helpful votes show that consumers discount both the solicited reviews and the organic reviews written for hotels after they join the review solicitation program. Our findings suggest that review platforms and firms should be cautious about the unintended negative consequences of review solicitation on consumers’ review generation and perception.