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The purpose of this study is to explore the effect of reviewer qualification and credibility (RQC) and hotel classification involving online hotel reviews (OHRs). The study examines the effects of the reviewer level as a proxy of RQC on review helpfulness and reviewing behavior (review rating, review length). The study also included hotel classification as a moderating variable.

Data from 1,968 reviews were collected from TripAdvisor.com using a web data-harvesting technique. Hypothesized relations in the model were tested with t-test and MANOVA analysis.

The empirical results show that the effect of reviewer level on review helpfulness is not significant. In addition, a high-level reviewer tends to leave a lower rating and a lengthier review than a low-level reviewer. Regarding the moderating effects, for the high-level reviewer, three-star independent hotels have a greater effect on review helpfulness.

The study has several useful implications for researchers, hotel industry when managing OHR and disseminating information to their potential consumers.

The findings help online review website organizers manage the operation of RQC and hotel classification in a proper manner. Marketing managers, especially those of three-star independent hotels, can effectively utilize review management to the desired effect.

Unlike previous studies, this study explores the effect of RQC on review helpfulness and reviewing behaviors across the hotel classification. In addition, this study contributes to the hotel industry developing more effective online reviews from the reviewer level and diverse hotel types (three-star independent, four-star chain, five-star luxury hotels).

This paper aims to examine the perceptions of auditor roles on the workpaper review process in current audit practice. Specifically, the paper investigates how an auditor’s defined role leads to perceived differences in what initiates the workpaper review process, the preferred methods for performing reviews and the stylization or framing of communicated review comments.

A survey was administered in which practicing auditors were asked about workpaper review process prompts, methods and preferences. The survey was completed by 215 auditors from each of the Big 4 accounting firms and one additional international firm. The final data set consists of quantitative and qualitative responses from 25 audit partners, 33 senior managers, 30 managers, 75 in-charge auditors/seniors and 52 staff auditors.

Findings indicate reviewers and preparers differ in their perceptions of the review process based on their defined roles. First, reviewers and preparers differ in their perspectives on which factors initiate the review process. Second, the majority of reviewers and preparers prefer face-to-face communication when discussing review notes. Reviewers, however, are more likely to believe the face-to-face method is an effective way to discuss review notes and to facilitate learning, whereas preparers prefer the method primarily because it reduces back-and-forth communication. Finally, reviewers believe they predominantly provide conclusion-based review notes, whereas preparers perceive review notes as having both conclusion- and documentation-based messages.

This paper advances the academic literature by providing a unique perspective on the review process. Instead of investigating a single staff level, it examines the workpaper review process on a broader scale. By obtaining views from professionals across all levels, this work intends to inspire future research directed at reconciling differences and filling gaps in the review process literature. The finding that reviewers and preparers engage in role conformity that leads to incongruent perceptions of the review process should encourage the consideration of mechanisms, with the potential to be tested experimentally, by which to reconcile the incongruities.

Results support recent regulator concerns that there are breakdowns in the workpaper review process, and the findings provide some insight into why these breakdowns are occurring. Incongruent perceptions of review process characteristics may be the drivers of these identified regulatory concerns.

This is the first study to examine current workpaper review processes at the largest accounting firms from the perspective of both preparers and reviewers. From this unique data set, one key interpretation of the findings is that workpaper preparers do not appear to recognize a primary goal of the review process: to ensure that subordinates receive appropriate coaching, learning and development. However, workpaper reviewers do, in fact, attempt to support preparers and work to create a supportive team environment.

Online hotel ratings, a form of electronic word of mouth (eWOM), are becoming increasingly important to tourism and hospitality management. Using sentiment analysis based on the big data technique, this paper aims to investigate the relationship between customer sentiment and online hotel ratings from the perspective of customers’ motives in the context of eWOM, and to further identify the moderating effects of review characteristics.

The authors first retrieve 273,457 customer-generated reviews from a well-known online travel agency in China using automated data crawlers. Next, they exploit two different sentiment analysis methods to obtain sentiment scores. Finally, empirical studies based on threshold regressions are conducted to establish the asymmetric relationship between customer sentiment and online hotel ratings.

The results suggest that the relationship between customer sentiment and online hotel ratings is asymmetric, and a negative sentiment score will exert a larger decline in online hotel ratings, compared to a positive sentiment score. Meanwhile, the reviewer level and reviews with pictures have moderating effects on the relationship between customer sentiment and online hotel ratings. Moreover, two different types of sentiment scores output by different sentiment analysis methods verify the results of this study.

The moderating effects of reviewer level and reviews with pictures offer new insights for hotel managers to make different customer service policies and for customers to select a hotel based on reviews from the online travel agency.

This paper contributes to the literature by applying big data analysis to the issues in hotel management. Based on the eWOM communication theories, this study extends previous study by providing an analysis framework for the relationship between customer sentiment and online hotel ratings from the perspective of customers’ motives in the context of eWOM.

The purpose of this study is to present a methodology for enhancing the quality and usefulness of online reviews for prospective customers to investigate how this contemporary form of instrumental support can be facilitated to strengthen customer-to-customer support.

This study develops an analytics framework with applications of machine learning models using customer review data from Amazon.com. Linear regression is commonly used for review helpfulness and sales prediction. In this study, Random Forest model is applied because of its strong performance and reliability. To advance the methodology, a custom script in Python is created to generate Partial Dependence Plots for intensive exploration of the dependency interpretations of review helpfulness and sales. The authors also apply K-Means to cluster reviewers and use the results to generate reviewer qualification scores and collective reviewer scores, which are incorporated into the review facilitation process.

The authors find the average helpfulness ratio of the reviewer as the most important determinant of reviewer qualification. The collective reviewer qualification for a product created based on reviewers’ characteristics is found important to customers’ purchase intentions and can be used as a metric for product comparison.

The findings of this study suggest that service improvement efforts can be performed by developing software applications to monitor reviewer qualifications dynamically, bestowing a badge to top quality reviewers, redesigning review sorting interfaces and displaying the consumer rating distribution on the product page, resulting in improved information reliability and consumer trust.

This study adds to the research on customer-to-customer support in the service literature. As customer reviews perform as a contemporary form of instrumental support, the authors validate the determinants of review helpfulness and perform an intensive exploration of its dependency interpretation. Reviewer qualification and the collective reviewer qualification scores are generated as new predictors and incorporated into the helpfulness-based review facilitation services.

This study aims to adopt a cognitive heuristic approach to investigate the interaction effect of a message source characteristic (reviewer expertise [RE]) and two message structure characteristics (review rating consistency [RC] and review valence [RV]) on the perceived credibility of hotel online reviews.

Data were collected from 242 university students and were analyzed by three-way analysis of variance through a 2 × 2 factorial experiments using a simulated hotel review page on TripAdvisor.

Results show a three-way interaction effect of RE, RC and RV on the perceived credibility of hotel online reviews. The main effects of the three factors are also determined. Higher perceived credibility scores are found for negative reviews, reviews written by experts and reviews with a consistent rating.

This study adopts an experimental approach and is the first to investigate the three-way interactions of message source and message structure characteristics of online hotel reviews. Data were collected from students in a university in Hong Kong. Results may not be generalizable to other markets.

Results suggest that reviews written by experts have higher perceived credibility. Hotels should pay attention to the content of online reviews and the expertise level of reviewers. Efforts should be exerted to create positive experiences for hotel guests that motivate expert reviewers to write positive reviews. Note that negative reviews have higher perceived credibility than positive ones. Hotels should promptly address negative reviews and provide professional responses to reviewers. Platform operators of user-generated content (UGC) should create well-defined reviewer profiles that can serve as cues that communicate the different expertise of reviewers.

This study is the first to test the three-way interaction effect of RE, RC and RV on the perceived credibility of hotel online reviews. Results provide recommendations to hotels and UGC operators and enable them to benefit from emerging UGC usage.

Identifying and predicting the most helpful reviews has been a focal interest in the fields including information management, e-commerce and marketing, etc. Though many factors are found correlated to the helpfulness of reviews, they may suffer endogeneity problems, as normally the data is observed in the same time window. This paper aims to tackle such a problem by examining the predictive power of different factors on the future increment of review helpfulness.

Adopting a longitudinal data of 443 K empirical business reviews from Yelp.com collected at two different time points, six groups of predictors are extracted from the first snapshot of data to predict the helpfulness increment of old and recent reviews, respectively, between the two snapshots.

It is found that these factors in general are with moderate accuracy predicting the helpfulness increment. A different group of features shows quite different predictive power. The reviewer disclosure information is the most significant factor, while the review readability does not significantly improve the accuracy of prediction.

Instead of the total number of helpful votes observed in the same time window with the explanatory variables, this paper focuses on the future increment of helpful votes observed in the following time window. With such a two-wave data set, the endogeneity problem can be avoided and the explanatory factors for review helpfulness can, thus, be further tested in the prediction scenario.

As online reviews have become a potent marketing tool, the underlying motivation has come into question. Focus has shifted towards assessing reviewer credibility before appraising online review credibility. Guided by source credibility theory, this study investigates the effect of reviewers’ historical ratings on review helpfulness to gain insight into the role of reviewer credibility.

We explore readers’ underlying psychological processes using web data analysis (Study 1) and experiments (Study 2). Study 1 empirically examines the effect of reviewers’ historical ratings on review helpfulness using 100,621 reviews authored by 890 TripAdvisor reviewers. Study 2 involves two experiments with 328 participants to scrutinize the readers’ underlying mechanisms in establishing reviewer credibility, with a specific focus on the effect of reviewers’ historical ratings.

When a reviewer’s historical ratings are predominantly extreme, readers perceive the reviewer as less credible, leading to decreased helpfulness in reviews authored by that reviewer. Interestingly, high negativity in historical ratings does not have a significant effect on either reviewer credibility or review helpfulness.

This study offers two significant contributions to the existing literature. First, it extends previous research on review helpfulness by incorporating reviewers’ historical rating behavior. This provides a more comprehensive understanding of the factors that influence the perceived usefulness of reviews. Second, it integrates two distinct research methods: TripAdvisor web data analysis and experiments. This methodological synthesis enhances the robustness of the study by offering a more nuanced and well-rounded perspective on the dynamics between reviewers’ historical ratings and perceived helpfulness of reviews.

A recent change to audit workpaper review has been the movement toward delegating more review tasks to senior auditors and including more staff auditors in the review process. This study investigates the efficiency and effectiveness implications of this change. It considers the calibration of reviewers of different levels of experience on both conceptual and mechanical errors. The results reveal that reviewers are miscalibrated (overconfident) in their workpaper error judgments. No differences are found in the calibration of staff and senior auditors across hierarchical level or type of error. The implications for audit effectiveness are discussed in the paper.

The experiential nature of travel and tourism services has popularized the importance of electronic word-of-mouth (EWOM) among potential customers. EWOM has a significant influence on hotel booking intention of customers as they tend to trust EWOM more than the messages spread by marketers. Amid abundant reviews available online, it becomes difficult for travelers to identify the most significant ones. This questions the credibility of reviewers as various online businesses allow reviewers to post their feedback using nickname or email address rather than using real name, photo or other personal information. Therefore, this study aims to determine the factors leading to reviewer credibility.

The paper proposes an econometric model to determine the variables that affect the reviewer’s credibility in the hospitality and tourism sector. The proposed model uses quantifiable variables of reviewers and reviews to estimate reviewer credibility, defined in terms of proportion of number of helpful votes received by a reviewer to the number of total reviews written by him. This covers both aspects of source credibility i.e. trustworthiness and expertness. The authors have used the data set of TripAdvisor.com to validate the models.

Regression analysis significantly validated the econometric models proposed here. To check the predictive efficiency of the models, predictive modeling using five commonly used classifiers such as random forest (RF), linear discriminant analysis, k-nearest neighbor, decision tree and support vector machine is performed. RF gave the best accuracy for the overall model.

The findings of this research paper suggest various implications for hoteliers and managers to help retain credible reviewers in the online travel community. This will help them to achieve long term relationships with the clients and increase their trust in the brand.

To the best of authors’ knowledge, this study performs an econometric modeling approach to find determinants of reviewer credibility, not conducted in previous studies. Moreover, the study contracts from earlier works by considering it to be an endogenous variable, rather than an exogenous one.

The conclusions of studies on the factors correlated with the perceived usefulness of online reviews are inconsistent due to differences in research perspectives, research objects, research methods and data types. This study conducted a meta-analysis to verify a proposed model of perceived usefulness to obtain general conclusions.

A meta-analysis was conducted to study the factors correlated with the perceived usefulness of online reviews based on 51 studies.

The results indicate that, with the exception of negative reviews, the order of relevance for the perceived usefulness of online reviews is as follows: the trust tendency of review readers, review replies, review depth, review pictures, reviewer trustworthiness, positive reviews, reviewer expertise, review time and reviewer information disclosure. Perceived usefulness was significantly positively correlated with purchase intention. Review time, positive reviews and negative reviews were also more significantly correlated with perceived usefulness for search products than for experiential products. Review depth, reviewer trustworthiness, reviewer expertise and purchase intention had greater positive correlations with perceived usefulness for experiential products than for search products.

This study proposes an extended information adoption model based on argument quality and source credibility. The model includes personal factors such as the trust tendency of review readers, constructs a theoretical model of the factors correlated with the perceived usefulness of online reviews and considers the moderating effects of product type.