Examining the effect of reviewer expertise and personality on reviewer satisfaction: An empirical study of TripAdvisor

摘要

Understanding the determinants of reviewer satisfaction has attracted much attention from academics and practitioners in recent years. Based on theories from information systems and personality psychology, our paper empirically analyzes how reviewer expertise and personality affect reviewer satisfaction in different contexts. Using 43,816 online reviews from TripAdvisor.com, advanced techniques of text analysis, and multiple estimation methods, reviewer expertise and personality are found to significantly affect their satisfaction with hotels. In particular, the difference in the review rating and text sentiment caused by reviewer expertise and personality is up to 0.885 and 23.43%, respectively. Second, our results show that a leisure trip positively (negatively) moderates the impact of reviewer expertise (personality) on satisfaction. By comparison, the moderating effect size of the travel type is much stronger on personality than on expertise. Third, the performance analyses display that the joint contribution of reviewer expertise and personality to the review rating and text is 50.44% and 52.89%, respectively, which demonstrates the superiority of our proposed variables in explaining reviewer satisfaction. Our findings provide important contributions to the extant literature and offer critical managerial implications to hotel managers and system developers.