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This paper aims to examine the underlying motivations, attitudes and behaviors of exaggerated review posters and readers by examining the effect of review valence, emotional expression and language complexity on perceived poster, website and firm trustworthiness and subsequent behavioral intentions.

This research uses a mixed-method approach using the qualitative critical incident technique (CIT) and quantitative experimental design. Study 1 uses CIT to examine exaggerated online reviews from the poster perspective where Study 2 uses CIT to examine readers’ perceptions of exaggerated reviews. Study 3 conducts a between-subjects experimental design examining the impact of valence (positive vs negative) × emotion (low vs high) × language (vague vs detailed) on trustworthiness and behavior intention.

Results of the two qualitative studies (Study 1 and 2) find posters and readers use language complexity and emotions in exaggerated reviews. The results from the quantitative experimental design study (Study 3) find that language style and emotions influence customer perceptions of poster, website and firm trustworthiness, which also mediates the relationship between the qualitative aspects of review text on behavioral intentions.

The findings provide multiple practical implications on the prevalence of exaggerated online reviews and the importance of language and emotion in determining customer perceptions and behavioral intentions.

By focusing on both readers and posters in exaggerated eWOM, specific motivations, emotions and language, this research contributes to the literature of online reviews, customer misbehavior, trustworthiness, language use and value co-destruction in online environments.

Falsified online reviews (FORs) are the published/viewable consumer-generated online content regarding a firm (or its representatives) or its services and goods that is, to some degree, untruthful or falsified. The purpose of this study is first to explore the nature of FORs, focusing on reviewers' interpretations and refections on falsity, intent, anonymity and the target of their FOR. Secondly, the authors examine the valence and veracity dimensions of FORs and introduce a typology to differentiate their variations.

using an exploratory research design, 48 interviews were conducted with participants who post online reviews on social media about their experiences with food and beverage serving outlets.

The results show four common forms of FORs on social media. These are reviews focused on equity equalizing, friendly flattery, opinionated opportunism and malicious profiteering.

The authors provide exploratory and in-depth information via interviews, but do not analyse the content of FORs.

Firms should be aware of varieties of FORs and that these may not be limited to malicious content. This is important in terms of showing that in dealing with FORs, a one-size-fits-all approach will not work. FORs are not always entirely fabricated, and instead various levels of falseness are observed, ranging from slight alterations to complete fabrications.

Previous research explored how to identify and differentiate FORs from truthful ones, focusing on the reviews or how they are perceived by readers. However, comparatively little is known of the reviewers of FORs. Hence, this study focuses on reviewers and offers new insights into the nature of FORs by identifying and examining the main forms of FORs on social media.

The study aims to examine the effects of ulterior motives in peer and expert supplementary online hotel reviews on consumers' perceived deception, dissatisfaction, and its downstream effects on altruistic response and repurchase intentions. The research also examines the moderating role of hotel attribute performance on perceived deception and its consequents.

This study used convenient non-probability sampling and collected data from 448 inbound tourists in China. It used partial least square structural equation modeling technique and SmartPLS 3.0 for analyzing the main and moderating effects of the variables.

The ulterior motives in peer and expert supplementary reviews significantly affect perceived deception, further leading to consumers' dissatisfaction and engagement in altruistic response. Noticeably, consumers' dissatisfaction is positively associated with repeat purchase intentions. Hotel attribute performance significantly moderates the relationship between the ulterior motives in supplementary reviews and consumers' perceived deception.

The study examines the key issue in online hotel reviews using the expectancy disconfirmation theory and identifies consumers' altruistic behavior because of their dissatisfaction, contributing to ethics and consumer behavior literature. Moreover, the research offers prolific implications for hotel and travel websites and hoteliers in the study context.

Hotel employees’ occupational stigma is often overlooked. Exploration of hotel employees’ occupational stigma representations, perception pathways and destigmatization provides an empirical basis for positive organizational behavior and psychology in the hotel industry. Therefore, this study aims to better understand the mechanism underlying inherent of occupational stigma.

This study adopts a five-factor narrative analysis involving stigma narrative interviews with a purposed sampling of hotel employees (n = 18). Based on occupational stigma and resource conservation theories, this study designed a five-factor narrative analysis structure chart as the basis for data analysis.

Findings indicate the existence of four quadrants of perceived occupational stigma attribute distribution, two paths of perceived occupational stigma formation and a more systematic occupational destigmatization mechanism path.

The occupational destigmatization path and countermeasures proposed in this study can resolve talent drain and eliminate stereotyping in the hotel industry, which promote the industry’s rapid recovery and sustainable healthy development, providing the practical management guidelines for public communication via social media, and offer practical significance for existing hotel human resource management in modules such as organizational culture and training.

This study broadens investigations of occupational stigma in a single, static context and explains the relationship between hotel employees’ stigma perceptions and destigmatization paths. Further, the mechanism of emotional energy distribution on spatial stigma was identified. These results have practical implications for organizational culture, training and employee care in hotel human resource management.

Drawing on the pleasure-arousal-dominance (PAD) emotion model, the emotional states of consumers embedded in online reviews can be described through three dimensions, that is, pleasure, arousal and dominance, rather than only the one-dimensional positive and negative polarity, as in previous studies. Therefore, this study aims to explore the effect of online review emotion on perceived review helpfulness based on these three basic emotional dimensions.

A lexicon-based method is developed to analyze PAD emotions of online reviews from JD.com. The zero-inflated negative binomial regression is utilized to empirically validate the study hypothesis. The authors examine the influence of pleasure, arousal, dominance, emotion diversity and emotion deviation on review helpfulness, as well as the moderating effect of product type on the relationship between all independent variables and online review helpfulness.

The study results show that the pleasure emotion impairs the helpfulness of online reviews, while the arousal and dominance emotions have a positive impact. Moreover, the authors find that compared with search products, the effects of pleasure, arousal and dominance on perceived helpfulness are strengthened for experience products. However, the emotional diversity and emotional deviation have opposite effects on the helpfulness of search products and experience products. Additionally, the results show that dominance emotion plays a more important role in the interaction effect.

The empirical findings confirm the applicability of PAD in the online review context and extend the existing knowledge of the influence of review emotion on helpfulness. A feasible scheme for extracting PAD variables from Chinese text is developed. The study findings also have significant implications for reviewers, merchants and platform managers of e-commerce websites.

This paper aims to provide an integrative view of the conceptualizations, definitions, antecedents and taxonomies of consumer complaining behavior (CCB). Additionally, the study aims to provide an updated synthesis and classification of both legitimate and illegitimate CCB antecedents, as well as an integrated CCB taxonomy.

A multi-stage systematic search is conducted and 226 research articles relevant to the scope of the study are analyzed to fulfill the study’s objectives.

Through an exhaustive aggregation, legitimate and illegitimate CCB antecedents identified in the literature are collated and a classification schema is developed. Deficiencies observed in extant CCB taxonomies are addressed and a refined taxonomy incorporating illegitimate CCB is developed.

The conclusions drawn on the basis of this paper are contingent on the effectiveness of the keyword-based systematic search process that is used to demarcate the extant literature.

This paper suggests a three-pronged approach of differential enabling, legitimacy evaluation and differential management. This holistic perspective aims at enabling firms to design complaint management policies and systems that control fake complaints while maintaining sufficient redress opportunities for genuine dissatisfaction.

The paper proposes an identical classification schema for legitimate and illegitimate CCB antecedents and is the first broad-based attempt to develop an integrated CCB taxonomy.

Consumers’ evaluation of online review helpfulness has been widely examined. The extant literature suggests that the attributes of review content (e.g. review length and extremity) influence review helpfulness. However, review length cannot fully reflect the richness of the review content. Anchoring on information diagnosticity and extremity bias, this study aims to explore the effect of review comprehensiveness on its helpfulness.

Field observations were obtained from 11,812 online restaurant reviews on a popular restaurant review platform. A controlled experiment was conducted to further delineate the effect of review comprehensiveness.

Review comprehensiveness moderates the effects of review length and an extremely negative review on helpfulness. It also confirms that for reviews of the same length, one covering more aspects is perceived by consumers as more helpful.

Different aspects of information in a review can efficiently assist decision-making. The results suggest that review platforms can better design their interface by providing separate areas for different product aspects. The platform can then receive more comprehensive and helpful reviews and increase the diagnosticity of these.

The study enriches the literature by introducing review comprehensiveness and examining the joint effects of review length and comprehensiveness on helpfulness. It also contributes to the literature by indicating how to reduce the effect of review extremity.

The purpose of this review paper is to identify the themes of hospitality and tourism innovation research published in academic and trade journals between 2010 and 2020, to explore the common and different areas of interest between academia and the industry and to examine the trends of innovation research themes during this period to suggest future research directions.

The EBSCO Hospitality and Tourism Index was used as the data source. Co-word analysis was conducted via the Leximancer software to identify key areas of interest in hospitality and tourism innovation. Trends in hospitality and tourism innovation over the ten-year period were revealed by a time-dimension analysis.

This study produced a conceptual map demonstrating focal points and trends in hospitality and tourism innovation. Trade journals were found to be dominated by product innovation driven by technological development, while academic journals covered more topics, such as employee innovation, sustainable innovation, leadership innovation and user generated content (UGC). Academia was shown to follow in the footsteps of industry in publication on several topics. Furthermore, academic interest in certain topics, such as hotel service innovation, UGC and social media, lasted several years.

This study can facilitate knowledge transfer between academia and the industry. It also provides directions for future research based on historical and comparative analysis.

This research extends the scope of existing review studies by including articles published by trade journals. It also adds a time dimension, which helps to unveil the evolution process of hospitality and tourism innovation research and practice.

Reviews recent interlending and document supply literature. Considers the implications of open access archiving and the ongoing developments in consortia and electronic journals. A number of other issues are reviewed briefly.

The widespread use of information and communication technologies enables consumers to obtain and share information whenever they feel the urge. With the advent of review websites and forums, companies and business owners may find themselves victims of consumer cyber aggression, which can hurt a company badly. This study aims to explore why consumers would engage in cyber aggression against companies, and to that end, it examines consumers’ ethical orientation and other possible drivers of cyber aggression.

To examine how ethical orientation affects consumers’ intention to engage in cyber aggression, a scenario-based 2 × 2 (deontological: moral/immoral × teleological: good result/bad result) between-subject experimental design is used. Moreover, 26 possible drivers in related literature are identified and included in a questionnaire administered to 226 college students.

The results show that adult consumers’ deontological and teleological evaluations significantly affect their ethical judgment about engaging in cyber aggression, which further impacts their intention to perpetrate an act of cyber aggression. Moreover, the study identifies six factors contributing to cyber aggression engagement as follows: personal aggressiveness, ease of perpetration, internet negativity, personal gains, helping the company and recreation.

Cyber aggression is generally viewed as interpersonal violence among adolescents. This study views cyber aggression from a different perspective and it is one of the few studies to look at adult consumers’ motivations to engage in cyber aggression against companies. The findings of this study can help firms understand why their customers attack them online, and understanding that will enable businesses to formulate more effective responses to attacks.