The Impact of Negative Online Review Consensus and Organizational Response Strategy on Potential Consumers' Attribution Process: The Case of Online Restaurant Review Websites

Internet technology has empowered consumers to voice and share their complaints with a multitude of potentialconsumers on the Internet in a flash manner. Online consumer reviews, due to their being widely and rapidly spread,significantly influence a potential consumer’s judgment of hospitality service quality that in turn affects a company’sreputation and profit. Prior research highlighted the importance of proactive online reputation management as theirimpacts become devastating when the reviews are negative and highly agreed by others. The current study attemptedto understand how a potential consumer integrates online consumer reviews into their evaluations of the restaurantservice and to suggest the appropriate organizational response strategy to negative online reviews. By means of anexperiment, we explored the most effective ways for restaurants to counter complains as expressed in negativeelectronic word of mouth. The findings showed that high level of consensus on a negative online review negativelyaffects the weights and attributions of the negative review that potential consumers bring to their evaluations aboutthe restaurant. Yet, these negative consensus effects can be either accelerated or attenuated according to the differenttypes of response strategies. The findings were discussed in the light of practical implications for online complaintmanagement. Limitation and directions for future research were also discussed.