Research On The Influence Of External Stimuli On User Generated Content

The development of Internet and social media has promoted the generation of user generated content,and has facilitated the exchange and information sharing between online users.With the continuous development of the Internet and electronic trading platforms,third-party review platforms have emerged,which enables consumers to share their opinions about a product or service with others and promotes the formation of user generated content.Online reviews are the dominant form of user generated content and reflect as online sellers’ online WOM.Sellers can rely on online reviews,as an important marketing resource,to have a deep understanding of consumers’ consumption experience,attitudes,feelings,and preferences.Online WOM competition in e-marketplaces is similar to advertising competition in traditional markets,which can influence sellers’ reputation and market power of their business.Therefore,it is important to have a deep understanding of the antecedents of online reviews.A comprehensive extant literature has focused on the impact of reviewers’ personal traits and factors related to product and service providers.However,there are still contents need to be further explored and expanded in the research on external stimuli such as third-party review platform related factors and environmental stimuli.This article collects user generated content data of catering business from Dianping,the most popular and widely used consumer review platform in China,to explore the influence of external stimuli(i.e.,platform policy shock and environmental stimuli)on user generated content based on the characteristics of the catering business.Among them,the platform policy shock is mainly concerned with the implementation of anonymous comment policy on Dianping,while the environmental stimuli are mainly concerned with the air quality as the weather factor,as well as the holiday effect and the food culture circle as the cultural factors.The specific research contents include the following four aspects:(1)To study the impact of anonymity on user generated content.The implementation of “anonymous review” policy on Dainping is a policy change from identity disclosure to having the option to review under anonymity,which allows reviewers’ choosing not to disclose their own information while posting reviews.This paper exploits a natural experiment setup and ground in the theories of deindividuation and social presence,and the notion of negativity bias to investigate the effects of platform policy shock on user generated content in terms of their rating behavior and emotional expressions in review texts about the restaurants.The results show that the anonymity function implementation induces a decrease in overall ratings and a decrease(increase)in positive(negative)emotions on average.Furthermore,using the reviews after the policy change,we find that,compared to non-anonymous reviews,anonymous ones are usually more negative,which can further induce subsequent reviewers’ negative reviews about the restaurants.Our findings underscore the doubled-sides of an “anonymous review” function the platform and restaurant managers need to balance in practice.(2)To study the impact of air quality on user generated content.Environmental factors are supposed to induce mood misattribution and lead to individuals’ behavioral biases.Based on mood misattribution theory,this paper examines whether air pollution can lead to consumers’ mood misattribution behaviors.That is,whether they will post lower online ratings towards restaurants when encounter air pollution.The results show a negative relationship between air pollution and online ratings,which can be explained by both the spatial effect and temporal effect.Our tests of the spatial effect show that a good air quality city a restaurant locates in can induce stronger effect of air pollution on online ratings.Tourist reviewers are the main drivers in this relationship than their native peers,and those tourist reviewers who are from bad air quality cities mainly induce the online rating bias on polluted days.Furthermore,for native reviewers,the impact of air pollution on online ratings can be explained by the temporal effect,which is driven by persistent air pollution rather than air deterioration.This research provides a reference for business managers’ management strategies as mood manipulation.(3)To study the impact of holidays on user generated content.Many studies have demonstrated the holiday effect,as one of the exogenous cultural factors,in human decision-making.This paper based on loss aversion and reference dependence,which are two core tenets of prospect theory,to explores whether and how a holiday effect exists in user generated content.The results show that reviewers tend to give lower online ratings to restaurants on holidays,which is in line with loss aversion;that is,reviewers give more weight to losses than gains on holidays.This relationship between holidays and online ratings is mediated by reviewers’ emotion.Reviewers on holidays tend to generate more negative and less positive emotion which leading them to post lower online ratings.Furthermore,this study adopts the concept of reference dependence to take reviewer heterogeneity into account.Specifically,compared with native reviewers,tourist reviewers are more likely to be affected by a negative holiday effect and give lower online ratings.The investigation of tourist reviewers and native reviewers shows that travel experience can weaken tourist reviewers’ negative online rating behavior on holidays,while male native reviewers are more likely to post lower online ratings on holidays.(4)To study the impact of food culture on user generated content.Culture has been confirmed to play an important role in affecting user generated content.However,no study has explored the relationship between food culture and online ratings about restaurants.This paper first answers the question that whether food culture can influence tourist reviewers’ online rating behavior considering both the food culture in their residence and that in their destination.We find that tourist reviewers are more likely to give a lower online rating when they experience a food culture in the destination consistent with that in their residence.In addition,they tend to give more weight on taste dimension than on environment and service dimensions when they experience a food culture consistency.This paper also finds that reviewers with more travel experience tend to post lower online ratings when they experience food culture consistency.