Why Is the Grass Always Greener on the Other Side? Tourist Bias in Online Restaurant Ratings

Abstract

An important assumption underlying online ratings’ helpfulness is that rating valence can serve as a good proxy for the quality of a product or service. However, consumers with different backgrounds may have different quality perceptions of the same product or service. As one of the most common types of reviews, restaurant reviews can come from two very different groups of customers: locals and tourists. Merely showing the average rating of a restaurant by pooling all ratings may not be helpful for consumers who wish to determine whether a given restaurant is a good match for them. We find that traveler consumers are much more likely than local consumers to provide higher restaurant ratings, and they tend to attach more pictures, write shorter reviews, and use fewer cognitive words. Individuals’ changes in focus and changes in evaluation processes induce such a tourist bias in ratings. Meanwhile, travel destination, restaurant cuisine authenticity, and consumers’ consumption pattern changes are not responsible for the bias. Our study demonstrates the necessity of differentiating travelers’ and locals’ ratings/reviews and identifies possible reasons behind the tourist bias, which can help retailers, consumers, and platforms better understand, utilize, and manage digital word-of-mouth in practice.Online product and service ratings have great value for both sellers and consumers. Prior research, however, often treats online ratings equally even if the individuals who generate these ratings have very different backgrounds. This study examines how tourists differ from locals when they generate online ratings. We find that, relative to locals, tourists exhibit an upward bias when they rate restaurants. More specifically, a consumer as a tourist is at least 13.4% more likely than as a local to give a higher rating (versus all lower ones) to a restaurant. We explore possible mechanisms underlying this tourist bias. Based on data from an online review platform for restaurants, we first confirm the phenomenon of upward tourist bias in online ratings at both reviewer and restaurant levels with multiple robustness checks. Then we conduct a series of analyses from reviewer, restaurant, cuisine, and city levels to identify factors leading to such a bias. We are able to examine the reasons related to consumption pattern such as restaurant price/service/environment, cuisine authenticity, tourists’ evaluation process, differences between city sizes, and so on. We find that individuals’ change in focus (from location, cooking, and price to service, environment, and emotions) and change in evaluation process (from cognitive to affective) can induce the tourist bias in ratings. We also discuss theoretical and practical implications for online review platforms, product retailers, and consumers.History: Wonseok Oh, Senior Editor; Yuliang Yao, Associate Editor.Funding: This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China [Grants 72121001, 72571267, 72071038, and 7247030852] and the Hong Kong University Grants Committee through General Research Funds [Grants 14500521, 14504524, and 165052947].Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/isre.2020.0620 .