Do Online Friends Bring Out the Best in Us? The Effect of Friend Contributions on Online Review Provision

Abstract

Online reviews are a crucial source of information for consumer decision making. Many businesses, companies, and platforms are interested in encouraging more consumers to review their products but are dubious about using financial incentives to buy online reviews. Our research describes a social way of growing online reviews. We show that cultivating an online community for reviewing by showing members reviews written by their online friends cannot only increasing their willingness to contribute but also the quality of the resulting reviews. The takeaways of this study include (1) unlike using financial rewards to incentivize review contribution, the studied approach can motivate review contributions without compromising the quality of reviews contributed; (2) the effect of exposing consumers to their friends’ reviews is comparable to that of Yelp’s weekly newsletters (thus this can be a powerful way of motivating consumer reviews); and (3) to effectively leverage friend reviews, online platforms should facilitate social networking among users and build an online community that recognizes and rewards members who make frequent, high-quality contributions to online reviews.

Motivation behind review provision in online travel communities: do hometowner contributions matter?

“…First, prior studies noted that an effective method for improving social status is increasing social contacts (Anderson and Kilduff, 2009). Numerous high-quality reviews posted by hometowners mean that users' posted reviews will be easily noticed by certain social groups (people from the same city) compared with random strangers, thereby increasing their contributions' exposure (Ke et al, 2020). Second, a recent study showed that users will tend to improve the quality of their reviews after observing the existence of numerous highquality reviews because of social comparison (Liang et al, 2020).…”

“…Compared with inexperienced users, experienced users are better at searching for and processing information, potentially enabling them to considerably adjust their expectations and post high-quality reviews (Liang et al, 2017c). However, experienced users have a high social status in online communities and, thus, have little motivation to pursue a higher status because of increased difficulties (Ke et al, 2020). On the one hand, if user contribution is motivated by only pure altruism, then a substitution effect will exist between users' contributions and hometowners' contributions.…”

“…Driven by competitive altruism theory, recent studies began to observe whether users' knowledge-sharing behavior is affected by others' contributions. Ke et al (2020) used data from Yelp and found that contribution cues from users' social networks (e.g. friends) significantly affect their review provision.…”

“…However, most OTAs and online travel review platforms, such as Trip.com and Tripadvisor, do not encourage users to bond or form strong relationships with one another. In contrast to Ke et al (2020), this study focuses on a context in which strong social relationships among users are not allowed and all reviews are contributed by anonymous peers. In this context, users can detect only similarities or homogeneities between themselves and their peers through certain indirect cues such as location information.…”

“…From the perspective of motivation to improve review quality, some recent studies identified the effect of "peer influence" on customers' intention to post high-quality reviews. For Online travel communities example, Ke et al (2020) used data from platforms that encourage users to bond with members of their social network and found that review quality improves if a review is posted after a friend's recent review.…”