simply, the idea is this: because someone is listening, consumers talk more.
Specifically, we investigate whether the introduction of managerial responses
lead consumers to write more reviews and whether it leads them to put more
effort into reviewing, as measured by writing longer reviews. However, this
simple idea leads to a slightly more subtle hypothesis about review valence.
One of the primary motivations for responding to a review may be to
encourage consumers to view the experience described in a negative review
as unlikely to be repeated. Indeed, much of the online discussion about
managerial response strategies emphasizes the importance of responding
to negative reviews and advice about how to respond to them
4
We will
demonstrate that more negative reviews are more likely to receive manage-
rial responses on reviewing platforms than are more positive reviews and
that responses to negative reviews tend to be much longer (and therefore,
presumably more substantive) than the responses to more positive reviews.
However, in responding to reviews that contain criticisms, the manager sig-
nals to consumers that those criticisms will be read by management, possibly
responded to, and possibly acted upon. If consumers write hotel reviews in
order to have an impact on hotel quality, responding to reviews will encour-
age future reviewing activity. However, if consumers perceive that managers
concentrate their response activity to negative reviews or if negative reviews
receive responses that promise more action, consumers may be encouraged
to post more negative reviews. Thus, while the motivation for responding to
a negative review is to mitigate its effects, responding to a negative review
may actually disproportionately encourage the posting of more negative re-
views. While we have not seen others in the literature hypothesize that
managerial responses stimulate negative reviewing, this hypothesis derives
straightforwardly from extant evidence in the literature on reviewer behavior
and the importance of negative reviews to management responders.
In this paper, we examine whether managerial response activity dispro-
portionately stimulates negative review production. In particular, we study
whether reviewing activity changes for a hotel following the first day of
posting of managerial responses on three websites that allow managers to
respond to reviews: TripAdvisor, Expedia, and Hotels.com.
Of course, in testing our hypotheses, we are faced with an identification
challenge. Clearly, hotels that post managerial responses are different from
hotels that do not. In time, the decision to commence posting responses
4
See for example the many articles that TripAdvisor has written in its “TripAdvi-
sor Insights” article series on the topic of managerial responses to negative reviews,
http://www.tripadvisor.com/TripAdvisorInsights/t16/topic/management-responses.
4