Perils of Review Solicitation: Evidence from a Natural Experiment on Tripadvisor

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Abstract
This study examines the effect of firms’ participation in review solicitation programs on consumers’ generation and perception of online reviews. We leverage a natural experiment on TripAdvisor, which launched a review solicitation program that allows hotels to collect reviews directly from guests after their stays. Applying a difference-in-differences approach to a panel dataset of online reviews for a matched set of hotels across TripAdvisor and Expedia, we find that hotels’ participation in the review solicitation program results in a 34.2% increase in review volume, a 0.145 increase in review rating, but a 16.2% decrease in review length. A closer inspection reveals that the effects on review valence and length are driven by the influx of more positive and shorter solicited reviews rather than by changes in the valence and length of organic reviews. The influx of solicited reviews, however, has a negative spillover effect on the volume of organic reviews due to a motivational crowding-out effect. Specifically, the volume of organic reviews is reduced by 15.3% after hotels start soliciting reviews. Further analyses show that solicitation disclosure hurts the perceived helpfulness of reviews, and this negative effect is alleviated by reviewer reputation. Our findings suggest that review platforms and firms should be cautious about the unintended negative consequences of review solicitation on consumers’ review generation and perception.

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