PACIS 2019 Proceedings

Abstract

Air pollution can damage individuals’ physical and mental health, as well as affecting mood. Prior studies show that air quality can influence people’s mood, and severe ambient air pollution can lead to bad mood, thus affects individuals’ behavior. However, the existing studies fail to confirm the relationship between air quality and online customer review. This paper takes online restaurant reviews as an example to examine the impact of air quality, a critical environmental indicator, on online customer reviews across 15 cities in China from December 2013 to October 2017. The results show that air quality index (AQI) in diners’ destination (the city where a restaurant is located) has a significantly negative impact on review rating and such a relationship is positively moderated by the AQI in diners’ hometown. Our results can offer helpful references for both the researchers and practitioners.

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