Research On The Antecedents And Consequences Of Electronic Word-of-Mouth In The Context Of Travel

In order to help the participants of modern e-commerce to effectively utilize the user-generated content,this work makes an in-depth discussion on the generation process and impacts of online user content.Taking online reviews of the tourism,hotel and leisure industries as an example,it focuses on three aspects:1)the impact of travel on consumers' online review behavior from a micro perspective;2)the influence of economic and cultural factors on online review behavior from a macro perspective;and 3)the impact of emotional expression in review texts on review helpfulness and review reader's engagement.The main steps of this work are as follows:1)using Python to write a web crawler to collect restaurant review data from Dianping,and identifying the reviews written by consumers on travel in order to investigate the influence of travel on consumers' review writing behavior through regression methods and a quasi-experiment way;2)calculating the distance between the residence of consumers and the location of restaurants,and constructing an empirical model to investigate the influence of consumers' travel experience and travel distance on the online review behavior of travelers;3)obtaining the per capita GDP of consumers' residence and the location of restaurants from the Chinese statistical yearbook,and constructing an empirical model to investigate the influence of economic status of consumers' permanent residence on their review behavior;4)collecting TripAdvisor's hotel reviews and combining them with Hofstede's cultural dimension index data to investigate the influence of consumers'cultural background on their online rating behavior;and 5)collecting film review data from Douban and using the negative binomial regression model to investigate the impact of emotional expression in online reviews on the helpfulness of and the reader participation in the reviews.The research conclusions mainly include the following:1)there is a traveler bias in online reviews--travelers tend to give higher ratings,attach more pictures,write longer reviews,and use more emotional words than local consumers;2)travel distance and travel experience positively affect the length of review text,the number of pictures and the number of emotional words used,and the restaurant price moderates this effect;3)consumers' economic status has a negative impact on their online ratings,and this relationship is moderated by the characteristics of the restaurant and consumer;4)the level of uncertainty avoidance of consumers has a negative impact on their online ratings,and this impact is smaller for business travelers and high-end hotels;5)review helpfulness plays a mediating role between review emotion and reader engagement,and the reviewer's expertise moderates this mediating effect and the direct influence of review emotion on review helpfulness.