There is plenty of empirical evidence to support the positive relationship between online review ratings and a business's bottom line. Not all online reviews carry the same effect, however. Those reviews that are exposed to more internet users will have a bigger impact on a business than the ones that are barely read by others. Generally speaking, all of those websites allow consumers to vote on the helpfulness of an online review and tend to feature the reviews with more helpfulness votes on the front page. The reviews listed on the first page will have a better chance of being "discovered" and read by others. Meanwhile, managers are usually allowed to reply to an online review with one manager response. I recently conducted an empirical analysis with another key investigator, Karen Xie at University of Denver . In this study, we drew our conclusions based on a linear regression model with 56,284 consumer reviewers and 10,797 manager responses from 1,405 hotels...
Hospitality/Tourism Management | Service Marketing | Information Technology