Paper ID
1658
Paper Type
short
Description
Online reviews play a considerable role in reducing the information asymmetry between sellers and potential consumers. Despite the rich body of literature on online reviews, little is known about how the chosen content of reviews influences the rating behavior. As products or services offer more than one possible evaluation characteristic, different reviews on a product or service refer to different characteristics. In our research-in-progress we investigate to what extent the valence of online ratings differs depending on whether the rating refers to utilitarian characteristic or hedonic characteristics. To answer this question, we crawled 55,601 customer reviews on Google Maps of visits to 149 German theaters and classified each review as being primarily utilitarian, hedonic, or ambiguous. For our dataset we can determine that reviews with hedonic content are on average 0.48 stars higher rated than utilitarian reviews. Our results carry substantial managerial implications for designers of review platforms and customers.
Recommended Citation
Seutter, Janina and Neumann, Jürgen, "Head over Feels? Differences in Online Rating Behavior for Utilitarian and Hedonic Service Aspects" (2019). ICIS 2019 Proceedings. 2.
https://aisel.aisnet.org/icis2019/crowds_social/crowds_social/2
Head over Feels? Differences in Online Rating Behavior for Utilitarian and Hedonic Service Aspects
Online reviews play a considerable role in reducing the information asymmetry between sellers and potential consumers. Despite the rich body of literature on online reviews, little is known about how the chosen content of reviews influences the rating behavior. As products or services offer more than one possible evaluation characteristic, different reviews on a product or service refer to different characteristics. In our research-in-progress we investigate to what extent the valence of online ratings differs depending on whether the rating refers to utilitarian characteristic or hedonic characteristics. To answer this question, we crawled 55,601 customer reviews on Google Maps of visits to 149 German theaters and classified each review as being primarily utilitarian, hedonic, or ambiguous. For our dataset we can determine that reviews with hedonic content are on average 0.48 stars higher rated than utilitarian reviews. Our results carry substantial managerial implications for designers of review platforms and customers.