Resonance of Review Behavior: Will People Follow in Their Friends’ Footsteps?

This study investigates factors affecting users’ review behavior on electronic word-of-mouth platforms, with a focus on the motivating influence of friends’ review contributions. Drawing on the theory of competitive altruism, the authors analyze how users perceive reputation-related competition on a platform. They additionally identify attributes related to friends, users, and companies that influence users’ review contributions. The authors obtained data from Yelp and constructed a data set of more than two million user–restaurant–week triads for analysis. The findings suggest that amateur friends’ reviews more strongly affect a user's likelihood of reviewing than expert friends’ reviews. In addition, users who have gained expert status are less influenced by their friends’ reviews than amateur users. As users’ review experience and social reach increase, the roles of friends’ reviews diminish when a person has a lower status than their friends. Moreover, the motivations stay focused on the reviewed company and do not spill over to other companies even when the motivations are recurring and prolonged. Following expert friends leads to user reviews that are more readable. Competing with low-status friends can afford users a reputational advantage particularly when these users have a higher status.