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An Empirical Examination of Online Restaurant Reviews (Yelp.com): Moderating Roles of Restaurant Type and Self-image Disclosure

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Information and Communication Technologies in Tourism 2016

Abstract

A growing reliance on online travel reviews (OTRs) as a salient information source facilitates research on online reviews in terms of consumer perceptions and purchase decisions about tourism products. Heretofore, most of literature on online reviews has been paying attention to text-based reviews. Due to the increasing usage of visual review formats, we explored the impact of image-based reviews on consumer evaluation of review usefulness. An empirical analysis was used to investigate the impacts of two presentation formats (i.e., text-based and image-based reviews within the same review) on review usefulness based on the Elaboration Likelihood Model. In addition, the moderating roles of restaurant type (i.e., casual vs. fine dining) and reviewers’ self-image disclosure in the evaluation of review usefulness were validated. A total of 2629 restaurant reviews on Yelp.com were gathered by using a web-harvesting method. Finally, the results indicate that not only text-based reviews but also the image-based reviews are indeed significant predictors of the perception of review evaluation. Moreover, restaurant type and self-image disclosure significantly moderate the effects of presentation formats on consumer evaluation. We discuss over these findings, and suggest theoretical and practical implications in conclusion.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Convention & Exhibition management, Graduate School, Kyung Hee University, Seoul, Republic of Korea

    Sunyoung Hlee & Jimin Lee

  2. School of Business, Ajou University, Suwon, Republic of Korea

    Sung-Byung Yang

  3. College of Hotel & Tourism Management, Kyung Hee University, Seoul, Republic of Korea

    Chulmo Koo

Authors
  1. Sunyoung Hlee
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  2. Jimin Lee
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  3. Sung-Byung Yang
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  4. Chulmo Koo
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Chulmo Koo .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. School of Tourism, Bournemouth University, Poole, Dorset, United Kingdom

    Alessandro Inversini

  2. HES-SO Valais, Sierre, Valais, Switzerland

    Roland Schegg

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© 2016 Springer International Publishing Switzerland

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Hlee, S., Lee, J., Yang, SB., Koo, C. (2016). An Empirical Examination of Online Restaurant Reviews (Yelp.com): Moderating Roles of Restaurant Type and Self-image Disclosure. In: Inversini, A., Schegg, R. (eds) Information and Communication Technologies in Tourism 2016. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-28231-2_25

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