Making restaurant reviews useful and/or enjoyable? The impacts of temporal, explanatory, and sensory cues

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to explore the impacts of temporal, explanatory, and sensory cues on customers’ perceived usefulness and enjoyment toward restaurant online reviews. Text mining approach and econometric analysis are used to examine 186,714 online reviews of 300 restaurants collected from Yelp.com. Empirical results show that temporal cues of online restaurant reviews affect review usefulness but not review enjoyment; explanatory cues have an important effect on both review usefulness and review enjoyment; sensory cues show much stronger effects on review enjoyment than on review usefulness. This study contributes to advancing both theoretical and managerial knowledge on online review management of social media platforms.