Response to online customer reviews helps increase sales. Extensive research has been carried out on this topic discussing tactics of response, while few scholars looked at it from the social network perspective. The problem is not how to respond but to whom to respond. Essentially, it is an effective online social network, not a response itself that generates trust and sales. In this paper, our main work is to use basic theoretical tools of social network theory to reveal the nature of the relationship between online response and performance. We use a web crawler to scrape data and get a sample of 3379 sellers from a B2B website. The regression results are consistent with the theoretical derivation and provide strong evidence for our assumptions and hypothesis. Sellers’ response to online customer reviews, especially to negative reviews, has a significant positive effect on its sales. Seller’s product price and product heterogeneity play moderating roles in the relationship above. Therefore, sellers should actively participate in online social conversations and get embedded in online social networks. Sellers should see pricing and product diversification strategies as important factors in the networking process. E-commerce platform companies should provide the necessary technical support to accelerate the formation of online communities. Producers should cooperate more with sellers and make full use of the customer review information for product improvement and innovation.
With the rapid development of Internet technologies and business models, the new Internet financial model represented by crowdfunding has become more and more popular among entrepreneurs and small and medium investors, serving as an important financing source for entrepreneurship and innovation. Accordingly, all major Internet entrepreneurial financing platforms have launched a standardized reputation evaluation system to facilitate investors to evaluate the quality of entrepreneurship program and service. Potential investors can also make investment choices based on the above-mentioned evaluation, which, together with the response to the evaluation, forms a reputation mechanism specific to Internet finance. Different from the traditional customer evaluation and evaluation feedback model, the aforesaid rating and entrepreneurs' responses are open and can transform the word of mouth into the entrepreneurs' reputation which will influence potential investors. Therefore, they have great significance and special research value. In spite of fairly complete research on evaluation of Internet financial investors, the research on entrepreneurs' response to the above-mentioned evaluation, especially that from the perspective of social network theory, is still in its infancy, lacking empirical verification and theoretical analysis. This paper, based on the data of 5893 science and technology programs collected from crowdfunding websites, specifies the empirical verification on effects and boundaries of different response behaviors and proposes corresponding management suggestions by effective combination and development of empirical research and social network theory.
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