온라인 레스토랑 리뷰 웹사이트에서 부정적 리뷰 컨센서스와 레스토랑 대응전략이 잠재고객의 귀인과정에 미치는 영향에 관한 연구

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

Internet technology has empowered consumers to voice and share their complaints with a multitude of potential consumers 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`s reputation and profit. Prior research highlighted the importance of proactive online reputation management as their impacts become devastating when the reviews are negative and highly agreed by others. The current study attempted to understand how a potential consumer integrates online consumer reviews into their evaluations of the restaurant service and to suggest the appropriate organizational response strategy to negative online reviews. By means of an experiment, we explored the most effective ways for restaurants to counter complains as expressed in negative electronic word of mouth. The findings showed that high level of consensus on a negative online review negatively affects the weights and attributions of the negative review that potential consumers bring to their evaluations about the restaurant. Yet, these negative consensus effects can be either accelerated or attenuated according to the different types of response strategies. The findings were discussed in the light of practical implications for online complaint management. Limitation and directions for future research were also discussed.