Review Helpfulness: The Influences of Price Cues and Hotel Class

Abstract

In the digital age, online reviews are increasingly used by consumers to understand product features and make purchase decisions. Despite the benefit brought to consumers, the popularity of reviews also causes information overload. To deal with this issue, consumers rely on hints to decide the reviews to read. A widely adopted hint is helpfulness of the reviews. Therefore, plenty of research efforts have been devoted to study the predictors of review helpfulness. To our best understanding, however, the effect of price cues on review help-fulness remains unknown. Since price is a crucial factor in product/service evaluations, online reviews with price cues are supposed to be helpful in a consumer decision-making process. Furthermore, consumers' emphasis on price information is supposed to vary with product class. Based on Cue Utilization Theory and Elaboration Likelihood Model, this study examined the effect of price cues on review helpfulness and the moderating role of hotel class. By analyzing 24,537 TripAdvisor reviews of hotels in New York City, we found that presence of price cues led to more helpful votes. However, it happened only for low-class hotels, but not for high-class counterparts. The study contributes to literature about determinants of review helpfulness, as well as provides implications for online travel review platforms to enrich their filtering function and for hoteliers to attract bookings.