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Online reviewers' identity information is an essential cue by which consumers judge reviews on ecommerce platforms. However, few studies have explored how prior anonymous reviews and focal reviews affect reviewers' preference for anonymity. The purpose of this paper is to investigate why reviewers seek anonymity in terms of prior anonymous reviews and focal reviews.

Based on restaurant reviews collected from meituan.com, one of the largest group-buying ecommerce platforms in China, this study employed logistic regression to examine how prior anonymous reviews and focal reviews are associated with reviewers' preference for anonymity.

Results show that the volume and sequence of prior anonymous review are positively associated with the likelihood of reviewers' preference for anonymity, whereas focal review valence is negatively correlated with this preference. Focal review length is positively correlated with reviewers' preference for anonymity but negatively moderates the roles of review valence and prior anonymous reviews on this preference.

This study expands the information disclosure literature by exploring determinants of user identity disclosure from a reviewer perspective. This research also offers a methodological contribution by employing a more accurate measure to calculate reviewers' preference for anonymity, enhancing the empirical results. Lastly, this work supplements the online review literature on how prior anonymous reviews and focal reviews are associated with reviewers' identity disclosure.

This study aims to investigate how prior reviews posted by other consumers affect subsequent consumers’ evaluations and to what extent the review temporal distance can increase or reduce the social influence of prior reviews. In this study’s restaurant context, review temporal distance refers to the duration between dining time and review time of a dining experience.

The data of paired online restaurant reservations and reviews are analyzed using Ordered Logit Model. Two robustness checks are conducted to test the stability of the main estimation results.

The empirical results demonstrate that consumers’ restaurant evaluation is socially influenced by both the prior average review rating and number of prior reviews; review temporal distance has a direct negative effect on consumers’ restaurant evaluation; and review temporal distance increases the social influence of prior reviews.

This study suggests that online review matters. Both restaurants and the online review platforms should encourage consumers to share their experiences and post online reviews immediately after their consumption.

The study contributes to the literature on electronic word-of-mouth, social influence and psychological distance. First, the bi-directional nature of social influence on electronic word-of-mouth for experience-oriented product is documented. Second, for the first time, this study examines how review temporal distance could affect the social influence on consumers’ restaurant evaluation.

This study aims to measures the effects of managerial response on consumer electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM) and hotel performance.

A sample of 56,284 consumer reviews and 10,793 managerial responses for 1,045 hotels was retrieved from TripAdvisor, along with 30,232 performance records matched to these hotels on a quarterly basis.

This study finds that managerial response leads to an average increase of 0.235 stars in the TripAdvisor ratings of the sampled hotels, as well as a 17.3 per cent increase in the volume of subsequent consumer eWOM. Moreover, managerial response moderates the influence of ratings and volume of consumer eWOM on hotel performance.

This study offers a practical model that enables hotel managers to orchestrate social media marketing approaches and efforts toward an optimal social media strategy.

This study differs from extant literature that has extensively focused on consumer reviews by providing a new perspective of management intervention in the social media context. By examining the interplay of managerial response and consumer eWOM at the individual hotel level, this study provides empirical evidence of managerial response affecting hotel performance through the increased ratings and volume of consumer eWOM. This study also offers insights into the practical importance of crafting intervention opportunities to cultivate the continued engagement of consumers on social media and increased hotel performance.

This paper aims to examine the influences of the number of hotel management responses and especially the textual similarity in hotel management responses to online reviews on hotel online booking.

This study used the data from 437 hotels in New York City on Expedia. The data specifically include online reviews, management responses and real-time number of online hotel bookings, which were merged to create one dataset for this study. To calculate the management response similarity, three widely recognized text mining functions of calculating textual similarity were adopted in this model. Fixed-effect panel data model was then used to examine the influence of management response to consumer online reviews on online hotel booking volume.

The empirical results demonstrate that the number of management responses to consumer online reviews does not significantly affect hotel booking; compared to none or only one management response, or management responses with low similarity, management responses with high similarity can significantly reduce the hotel booking on Expedia.

This study suggests that the similarity of management responses influences customers’ hotel booking, and hotel managers should avoid providing too similar management responses.

First, this study, for the first time, proposes the concept of management response similarity and its measurement methods. Second, this study takes an initial attempt to empirically test the influence of response similarity on hotel booking by using secondary data online.

Online reviews are often likely to be socially influenced by prior reviews. This study aims to examine key review and reviewer characteristics which may influence the social influence process.

Restaurant review data from Yelp.com are analyzed using an ordered logit model and text mining approach.

This study reveals that prior average review rating exerts a positive influence on subsequent review ratings for the same restaurant, but the effect is attenuated by the variance in existing review ratings. Moreover, social influence is stronger for consumers who had a moderate dining experience or invested less cognitive effort in writing online reviews. Compared to reviewers classified by Yelp as “elite,” non-elite reviewers appear more susceptible to the social influence of prior average review rating.

This study provides guidelines for mitigating the social influence of prior reviews and improving the accuracy of online product/service ratings, which will eventually enhance business and the reputation of online review platforms.

The findings from this study contribute to the electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM) literature and social influence literature in terms of the bidirectional nature of social influence on eWOM.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how regional factors affect customer satisfaction in the food service sector. This is achieved through investigating the moderating effects on the most important attributes of restaurants.

Hierarchical linear models, comprising customer observations nested within regions, were developed to explore whether there is any variance in customer satisfaction with the restaurants of an international chain (hereafter known as K Restaurants) across 52 regions in China and which regional factors contribute to understanding such variance.

The results indicate that there is an apparent difference in customer satisfaction across regions. Regional consumption level can positively (negatively) moderate the relationship between food taste (physical environment) and customer satisfaction. Economic condition and population density have a negative moderating effect on the relationship between the physical environment and customer satisfaction. Education level, however, does not have any regional effect on satisfaction.

Multinational companies or chain corporations must account for regional influences when evaluating their performance based on customer satisfaction surveys. Standardization across a nation is not necessarily the best approach because the various regions of a nation may differ in terms of socioeconomic condition.

This pioneering study examines the moderating effects of regional factors on the relationships between the attribute qualities of a restaurant and customer satisfaction.

Businesses need to make quick decisions and adjustments to fulfill the growing online demand. Previous studies examined various factors affecting the online sales performance of products such as books, electronics and movies; however, they paid limited attention toward the local brand clothing products. The current study investigates the importance of different kinds of seller-generated and consumer-generated signals such as price, discount, product ratings, review volume, review sentiment, number of questions and interaction between some of these factors for predicting the sales performance of clothing products.

The multiple linear regressions has been employed to investigate the influence of various predictor variables on sales performance. The study also examines the importance of these predictor variables by using different machine learning models, including random forest (RF), neural networks and support vector regression (SVR).

The findings of the study emphasize the importance of price and discount rates offered on the product. The quantitative characteristics of reviews, such as review volume and average rating, have been found to be more important predictors than sentiment strengths. However, the sentiment strength of reviews with higher helpfulness scores plays a significant role in predicting sales performance.

The study highlights the varying importance of seller-based and consumer-based signals in predicting sales performance. It also investigates the interaction effect of these two kinds of signals. The consumer-generated signals have been further divided into two components based on social influence theory, and the interaction effects of these components have also been examined.

Hotels are dependent on information and communication technologies (ICTs) for both their internal management and their relationships with customers and the other stakeholders. Therefore, research on ICTs in the hotel sector has kept growing lately. The purpose of this paper is to offer a review of the literature dedicated to ICTs in hotel management by analyzing papers published in seven prestigious journals in the field of Hospitality Management.

The 147 papers analyzed – published over a 27-year period – have been studied according to a variety of criteria such as their research methods, perspective, statistics used, topics covered, technologies and authors and countries.

The conclusions suggest a promising future regarding both ICT applications for hotel management and research in this area.

Concerning limitations, the most important one stems from the selection of works subject to examination because our analysis dealt with papers published in only seven journals, other publication sources have not been considered. Nevertheless, the present paper can prove useful both for researchers and hotel managers because new trends are emerging in both contexts with regard to technologies themselves as well as to some of their uses.

One of the most important contributions made with this work is the preparation of a list with the topics covered by the papers under examination. Moreover, no studies have to date specifically tried to identify the technologies used in hotel management by means of a literature review.

Information and communication technologies (ICTs) are a key player in the food services and restaurants sector; thus, the aim of this work consists in studying the previous research on ICTs in food services and restaurants in the context of tourism and hospitality through a systematic literature review.

The systematic literature review is performed on full papers published in journals included in the Journal Citation Report of the WoS in the category of Hospitality, Leisure, Sport and Tourism. A total of 165 articles from 28 journals are analyzed, following different criteria, such as the research methods, perspectives, statistical techniques, geographical focus, topics, technologies, authors and universities.

The restaurant sector is more and more based on the creation of experiences and ICTs, through their multiple possibilities, can undoubtedly contribute to adding value to the simple meal and create and recreate experiences to attract and retain customers who are increasingly sophisticated and hooked on ICTs. ICTs are basic for managers taking decision at the highest level in food services and restaurants, so ICTs should not be seen as a technical tool but as an essential element for top management.

This paper examined articles from very well-known tourism and hospitality journals, leaving aside others as well as different publication formats such as books or papers presented at conferences.

A significant contribution made with this paper is the availability of a list of topics in the context of ICTs in food services and restaurants. These topics are classified into three areas (Consumers, Suppliers and Environment and Tendencies) that can serve as a future research framework. The paper also provides useful information to restaurant managers about ICTs, to researchers for their future projects and to academics for their courses.