| The objective of these three essays is to understand the impacts of online word-of-mouth and management response to consumers' decisions and their satisfaction.;In the first essay, we investigate the dynamic relationship between online consumer reviews and management responses. To do this, we employ the panel vector autoregressive (PVAR) model. Our approach incorporates the interrelated relationships between the endogenous variables. We find that a firm's specific responses to positive reviews are positively related to consumer ratings and sentiment, but generic responses to negative reviews are negatively related to future ratings. In the second essay, we examine the impacts of conflicting information from multiple sources on the same product. To do this, we exploit the regression discontinuity design (RD), a kind of quasi-experimental research design. We find that if two information sources are inconsistent, customers tend to consider the difference in their decision-making process. The effect of information inconsistency from multiple sources could be moderated by contextual factors such as the number of customer reviews on each source and the organizational differences between the websites.;In the third essay, we try to answer whether a firm's management should respond more to positive reviews or to negative reviews and whether management response strategies, such as proactive and reactive, play a critical role in determining the change in customer satisfaction. We find that management response has a positive impact on customer satisfaction regardless of the type of customer review, additionally we find that the proactive approach positively moderates the impacts of management responses on customer satisfaction. |
