The Recent versus The Out-Dated: An Experimental Examination of the Time-Variant Effects of Online Consumer Reviews

Contextual Effects of Online Review Recency: Three Research Propositions

“…The propositions can serve as the foundation for future research on online reviews and information recency. Moreover, the current research contributes to the literature on the tourist’s information processing [ 7 , 13 ] and contextual decision-making, that is, which contextual factors should be considered to provide a more nuanced explanation of how travel information affects the tourist’s decision-making [ 11 , 16 ]. As for the practical implications, the propositions offer insights into tourism businesses’ online marketing strategies and interface design for information channels.…”

“…Findings of the study showed that there are different contextual factors involved in the effects of online reviews on tourist’s perceptions or decision-making. Essentially, it has been argued that the situational nature of the effects of review components should be acknowledged [ 16 ].…”

“…According to the construal level theory (CLT hereafter), when processing information regarding spatially-close objects or near-future events, individuals tend to prefer up-to-date information because it fits their mindset, what is called lower-level construal, and vice versa [ 29 ]. Jin et al [ 16 ] found that recent reviews are more influential in affecting consumer’s product choice for near-future purchase decisions. Given this finding and the argument of CLT, it is expected that the effects of review recency on tourist’s decision-making, that is, how influential tourists think recent reviews are as they select the place to visit, become more pronounced when tourists conduct local search.…”

“…Review recency manifests in several ways. In general, the posting date of each online review reflects how recently the review was uploaded to the review platform [16]. Along with posting date, some review websites show when the experience occurred to provide further assurance of review recency [15].…”

Does cultural distance affect online review ratings? Measuring international customers’ satisfaction with services leveraging digital platforms and big data

“…Today, consumer purchase intentions are increasingly influenced by online reviews, perceived as a credible source by consumers (Ludwig et al 2013;Zhu and Zhang 2010). Several scholars in multiple disciplines (including marketing, computer science, and management science) have examined the extent to which online consumer reviews impact consumer evaluations (Jin et al 2014;Singh et al 2014) and firm performance (Mariani and Borghi 2020;Mariani and Visani 2019;Yang et al 2018).…”