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Impact of air quality on online restaurant review comprehensiveness

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Abstract

Comprehensiveness is one of the most important textual content features of online review and exhibits significant impacts on consumer’s buying decisions. This paper explores the effect of air quality on review comprehensiveness by using a large-scale daily restaurant review dataset. By applying panel data and text mining method, we report an emotion-based underlying mechanism for the link between ambient air pollution levels and review comprehensiveness. Specifically, we show that air pollution levels significantly decrease review comprehensiveness, and emotion arousal mediates the relationship. Besides, our analyses reveal that the effect of the changing natural environment on reviews is asymmetrical, such that the negative relationship between air pollution levels and emotional arousal is stronger among novice reviewers. This research extends our current understanding of air pollution’s psychological and behavioral effects on review writers and suggests the importance of integrating air quality information into online review management strategies.

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Acknowledgements

The authors acknowledge the support of the National Natural Science Foundation of China [Project 71571029].

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Management and Economics, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu, Sichuan, P.R. China

    Jiaming Fang, Lixue Hu & Xiangqian Liu

  2. College of Business, University of North Texas, Denton, TX, 76201, USA

    Victor R. Prybutok

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Fang, J., Hu, L., Liu, X. et al. Impact of air quality on online restaurant review comprehensiveness. Electron Commer Res 22, 1035–1058 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10660-020-09445-w

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