Hospitality Administration and Management Commons^™

Social Influence On Consumers’ Online Review Behavior, Hengyun Li

Theses and Dissertations

Online reviews constitute an important source of word-of-mouth, which can affect consumers’ product choices as well as company sales and profitability. Therefore, understanding the factors underlying consumers’ online posting behavior is essential for business success and relevant knowledge development. This dissertation consists of three independent but closely related studies focusing on hotel and restaurant contexts. The objectives of this dissertation are to investigate how prior reviews and disconfirmation (i.e., the deviance between post-consumption evaluations and other consumers’ prior average review rating) may affect subsequent consumers’ online review-posting behavior in terms of their willingness to post online reviews, the review ratings …