Impact Of Online Reviews On Credibility And Consumers’ Trust On Hotels: The Role Of Message Inconsistency

The popularity of online reviews among consumers as a source of product’s knowledge and awareness, raised great concerns among researchers over its potential impact on consumers attitudes, purchasing intention, and consequently sales and profitability. Prior research has demonstrated that online hotel reviews can shape consumers attitudes and affect their purchase decisions. Despite the extensive literature on online consumers reviews there is also a noticeable gap in regards to the interplay between different components of an online review message. Scholars in this line of research studied the influence of each dimension of online hotel reviews independently from other dimensions. As a result, the issue of the interactions among different dimensions of online hotel reviews has been relatively overlooked by researchers in this line of research. This research is undertaken to fill this knowledge gap. The objective of the present research is to examine how the level of inconsistency between a quantitative dimension (review content) and a qualitative dimension (rating) can impact consumers’ perceptions of online reviews credibility and trust in the target hotel.Based on uncertainty reduction theory and need for cognition theory, the author hypothesizes that the degree of inconsistency between the review content and numerical rating (for one review in study2and for a set of reviews in study3) has a significant effect on the consumers perceptions of online reviews credibility and trust on the target hotel. It is also hypothesized that consumer expertise in online hotel reviews strengthens such effects. Furthermore, based on the elaboration likelihood model, it was also proposed that the effect is more salient for consumers high in need for cognition than consumers low in need for cognition.The research consists of three studies. Study Ⅰ adopts contents analysis techniques to discover the level and extent of inconsistency between reviews contents and ratings on travel websites platforms by randomly selecting reviews from real travel websites. Study Ⅱ examines the effects of inconsistency between contents and rating for an individual review on online reviews credibility and consumer trust. The sidedness of the argument and rating are manipulated (at different level of inconsistency). Respondents are randomly assigned to one of eight conditions in a2(rating:moderate vs. extreme)×2(content:one-sided vs. two-sided argument)×2(valence:positive vs. negative) experiment. Study Ⅲ follows similar procedures as for study Ⅱ with two exceptions. Study Ⅲ examines a set of reviews (10reviews) instead of one review and uses aggregated rating instead of individual rating. Respondents are randomly assigned to one of four conditions in a2(aggregated rating:high moderate vs. low moderate)×2(valence:positive-vs. negative).A total of374respondents (256in study Ⅱ and118in study Ⅲ) evaluated these reviews and assigned scores to each review for study Ⅱ and each set of reviews for study Ⅲ. The data was analyzed using linear mixed models. The results show that the level of inconsistency between contents and ratings influenced the perceptions of online reviews credibility and trust in the target hotel and review valence was found to moderate effect. The study also supported the hypothesis that consumer expertise strengthens the effect of inconsistent reviews. However, the hypothesis that consumer need for cognition moderates the effect of inconsistency on perceptions of credibility and hotel’s trust was not supported. The significance of these results and their managerial implications are discussed in detail.