The emergence of online product review forums has enabled firms to monitor consumer opinions about their products in real-time by mining publicly available information from the Internet. This paper studies the value of online product ratings in revenue forecasting of new experience goods. Our objective is to understand what metrics of online ratings are the most informative indicators of a prod...

Websites prominently display consumers' product ratings, which influence consumers' buying decisions and willingness to pay. Few insights exist regarding whether a consumer's online product rating is prone to social influence from others' online ratings. Examining this issue, the authors hypothesize that other consumers' online ratings moderate the effects of positive and regular negative featu...

Recently, the Internet has fostered a rapid rise in consumer-generated ratings. However, limited research has examined how these ratings reflect the opinions of the population at large, notably in the domain of professional services, where quality is often opaque to consumers. Building on the word-of-mouth research literature, we examine the relationship between online ratings and the offline p...

Online product review as a form of online Word of Mouth (WOM) and User-Generated Content (UGC) has attracted much attention recently. While there are many studies relating online reviews and product sales, the interesting and important problems regarding user review generation processes have been largely ignored. This study analyzes how online movie user ratings are generated through a complex ...

This paper studies the role of online ratings for the choice of multihoming on third-party O2O platforms. Specifically, the work investigates the main effect of online ratings and its interaction with operation duration and the number of screens. An ordered logit model is employed with a sample of 1902 cinemas multihoming on O2O platforms. The findings show that online ratings have significantl...

Online product ratings have become a major information source for customers, retailers, and manufacturers. Both practitioners and researchers predominantly interpret them as a reflection of product quality. We argue that they in fact represent the customer's satisfaction with the product. Accordingly, we present a customer satisfaction model of online product ratings which incorporates the cust...

Many U.S. restaurants have recently adopted no-tipping policies or are considering doing so. This study examines the effects of such moves away from tipping on restaurant’s online customer ratings. The results indicate that (i) restaurants receive lower online customer ratings when they eliminate tipping, (ii) online customer ratings decline more when tipping is replaced with service-charges th...

Social-networking functions are increasingly embedded in online rating systems. These functions alter the rating context in which consumer ratings are generated. In this paper, we empirically investigate online friends’ social influence in online book ratings. Our quasi-experiment research design exploits the temporal sequence of social-networking events and ratings and offers a new method for ...

Theorists have suggested some people find it easier to express their ‘‘true selves’’ online than in person. Among 523 participants in an online study, Shyness was positively associated with online ‘Real Me’ self location, while Conscientiousness was negatively associated with an online self. Extraversion was indirectly negatively associated with an online self, mediated by Shyness. Neuroticism ...