| With the rapid development of online media,more and more customers count on online reviews to help them make purchase decisions.Hence,some organizations expect their customers to post online reviews after purchase.In this context,some scholars began to pay attention to the topic of ?why customers are willing to post online reviews?.In these studies,online review is usually deemed as a unidimensional construct.As research progressed,a few of scholars realized that different types of online review could bring different values for the organization,and began to pay attention to ?what caused the customers to post different types of online reviews?.The transfer of the research topic brings two aspects of significance.First,it brings a more in-depth understanding of the value for different types of online reviews.For example,the positive and negative online reviews always bring different values for organization.From the perspective of other customers,visual content is more useful than textual content.Second,it provides a theoretical foundation for the organization to establish a more effective online review management strategy.It is necessary for scholars to investigate the reasons behind the online reviews so as to help organizations to allocate resources properly and establish a more effective online reviews guide strategy.However,the very few studies,on the topic of ?what causes customers to publish different types of online review?,have not yielded sufficient findings.Hence,some of the questions in the objective reality have not been answered and there are still some theoretical gaps need to be filled.For example,although existing research generally assumes that positive online reviews and negative online reviews have different values for organizations,no research has focused on whether the different positive online reviews are always bring same values for an organization.If not,it is necessary to identify the types of positive online review with regard to its value for a firm.Also it is necessary to investigate the reasons behind different types of positive online reviews,which is beneficial for firms to establish effective online review management strategies.Furthermore,it is necessary to evaluate the effectiveness of positive online review for other customers,which may help the organization to strike a balance in resource allocation.Based on the background above,this study takes the online travel community as an example,and carries three research works.First,this study divides positive online reviews based on their value and target into three forms including complimentary,constructive and prosocial online review.In order to verify the objectivity of the three dimensions of positive online review,this study conducted a content analysis on 1,800 positive online reviews collected from Tripa Advisor.The results confirmed the existence of three types of online reviews and found complimentary reviews appear in all of the samples;constructive reviews appear in twenty three percentages of the samples;and prosocial reviews appear only in fourteen percentages of the samples.As there were no scales that measures three types of online reviews,this paper developed scales for the three dimensions of positive online reviews.Particularly,this study obtained initial measurement items after literature research,interview study,and expert opinion investigation.Subsequently,the initial measurement items were purified through the first empirical investigation.Then a second empirical investigation was conducted to check the reliability and validity of the purified measurement items.The result indicates that the scales have a good reliability and validity.Second,according to social information processing theory,integrate reciprocity norm perspectives along with social exchange theory,psychological condition theory,and psychological reactance theory,this study developed a process-based model to explore the mechanisms underlying posters' assessments of internal and situational cues,which influence their willingness to contribute different forms of content in positive online reviews.A survey of 526 members of online travel websites in China is used to test our hypotheses with structural equation modeling.The result indicates that both complimentary and constructive reviews were positively related to posters' beliefs about firms' appreciation and sincerity,which were promoted by firms' responses to online reviews.Complimentary reviews were positively associated with posters' positive emotions,but negatively affected by belief about a firm's performance-driven motive,which was induced by a firm's request for online reviews.Service quality moderated this negative relationship.Appreciation from peers and peers' prosocial information contributions had a positive effect on the belief that peers' need for supportive information,which in turn,positively affected prosocial reviews.Third,a theoretical framework was provided based on prominent interpretation theory and source credible theory.The theoretical model describes a sequential process originated from the three dimensions of positive online reviews and ended with the credibility of online review,in which customers' perception of poster's trust is played as an intermediate variable.Three experimental studies were conducted to examine the hypotheses.The result of the first study shows that positive reviews containing complimentary and constructive information are more likely to cause high level of perceived posters' competence and integrity,compared with those positive reviews that only contain complimentary information;The higher customers' rating of a poster' competence and integrity,the higher customers' rating of the positive review's credibility.The result of the second study shows that positive reviews containing complimentary and prosoical information are more likely to cause high level of perceived posters' competence and benevolence,compared with those positive reviews that only contain complimentary information;The higher customers' rating of a poster' competence and benevolence,the higher customers' rating of the positive review's credibility.The results of the third study shows that compared with low risk-averse customers,the high risk-averse customers give higher ratings to posters who provide complimentary and constructive reviews than those who only provide complimentary information;When service organizations have lower brand reputations,customers will give posters contributing constructive and complimentary online review a higher rating of competence and integrity than those who provide only complimentary online review.The innovation of this study could be summarized as four aspects.First,it examine whether posts differ in terms of content,and to our knowledge,it is the first attempt to identify the different forms of positive online review content.As such,it deepens our knowledge of the qualitative nature of positive online reviews.Second,the online review scale was developed in this study,which provides operators and business practitioners with a tool to measure posters' contributions in positive online reviews.Third,this study elucidates the motives and psychological processes of the posters that affect their contribution of different types of positive online reviews,using the social information processing theory.Specifically,posters' interpretations of situational cues were tested as intermediate variables within our framework,which has seldom been done in past research.This should improve our understanding of the mechanisms underlying specific social information processes involved in posting online reviews.Fourth,this paper introduces the three dimensions of positive online reviews into the antecedent factors of online review credibility and explores the influencing mechanism of the content dimension structure of positive online review on customers' perceived credibility. |
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