Review manipolation in the hotel industry: the case of one- time contributors

Abstract

Although, review manipulation has shown to have a significant adverse impact on consumer welfare, there is yet little understanding of which economic incentives drive this behavior as most of the current research has focused on the characteristics that define a fake review. The present study investigates these incentives using the innovative approach of examining one-time contributor user reviews as an alternative measure of review manipulation. With a sample comprising 450 hotels, registered on TripAdvisor, from the cities of Amsterdam and Brussels two type of studies were developed encompassing both cross-sectional and panel data analyses. The empirical results obtained show that review manipulation is sufficiently economically important since agents with different economic incentives will indulge in review fraud in a dissimilar extent. These incentives were found to include: the type of organizational structure; the total number of reviews; and the attributed user bubble rating.