Research On The Effects Of Financial Strategy On Consumer Willingness To Post Positive Reviews And Merchant Inventory Decision

As a kind of electronic word-of-mouth,online reviews have become an important reference information for consumers before shopping.Due to the importance of online reviews,merchants want to influence consumers’ comment behavior through financial and other incentives,and even induce positive reviews.What’s more,some of positive reviews are fake reviews.Existing studies have focused on the influence of financial incentive strategy on the number of comments,the length of comments and the emotion of comments,but little attention has been paid to consumers’ willingness to post positive reviews,return behavior,the proportion of online fake reviews,and the inventory decisions of merchants.therefore,through experimental design and model analysis,this study explores the influence of financial incentive strategy on consumer review and return behavior as well as merchants’ inventory decisions and analyzes the generation of fake online reviews.First,this study investigates the effects of financial incentives and compassionate incentives on consumers’ intentions to post positive reviews.The results from three between-subject experiments show that financial incentives and compassionate incentives have positive influences on consumers’ intentions to post positive reviews.When consumers’ shopping experience is positive,or merchant strategy is unethical,the stimulation effect of these two types of incetives on consumers’ intentions to post positive reviews will be weakened.When consumers are experienced in online shopping,or consumer’s social class is low,the ethicalness of merchant strategy has a stronger moderating effect on the relationship between these two types of incentives and consumers’ intentions to post positive reviews.This study enriches the literature development of online comment incentive strategies,broadens the research boundary of unethical behavior of merchants,and provides practical guidance for merchants to adopt reasonable comment incentive strategies.Second,this study explores the influence of language structure design of card media on consumers’ willingness to post positive reviews.The results from two between-subject experiments show that using “greeting” and “after-sales guarantee” message have positive influences on consumers’ intentions to praise.When consumers’ shopping experience is negative,the stimulating effect of “aftersales guarantee” terms on consumers’ intention to praise will be enhanced.This study also finds that when the card contains financial incentive information,the stimulating effect of communication terms on consumers’ intention to praise will be weakened.Last,this study analyzes the effects of financial incentive on merchants’ pricing and inventory decisions,and the proportion of fake reviews.Combining with model analysis and numerical simulation experiment,this study focuses on a special financial incentive--praise cashback strategy(PCS),improves the newsboy model,and analyzes the influence of PCS on reviewing and return behaviors by describing consumer surplus.The results find that PCS may reduce the merchant’s order quantity and profit if the sold product quality is high or the effect of positive ratings on product sales is small.In addition,ex-post PCS can induce opportunistic consumer behavior,which directly reduces the welfare of merchants and consumers,and undermines the healthy development of online reviews.Our findings question the uncritical adoption of PCS for merchants and identify the relationship between PCS and the proportion of fake reviews.This study innovatively improves the newsboy model,enriches the literature research on the influence of financial incentive on business inventory decisions,and provides guidance for business and platform regulators to deal with the praise cashback strategy.All in all,based on the theories related to economics,psychology and marketing,throgh experimental analysis and model analysis,this study comprehensively explores the effects of financial incentive on consumers’ review behavior and merchants inventory decision.This study not only makes theoretical contributions to the literature about incentive type of online reviews,fake online reviews,card information presentation and merchant inventory decision,but also provides some guidance and suggestions for consumers,businesses and ecommerce regulators to understand and respond to cashback strategies.