Fake Reviews or Not: Exploring the relationship between time trend and online restaurant reviews

摘要

As online reviews are becoming increasingly important for newly opened restaurants, such reviews are frequently manipulated at the startup stage of these businesses, which negatively impacts their credibility. To establish the attributes of online reviews that might be manipulated, we conducted exploratory research with a total number of 4,450 data from Yelp.com. The findings indicate that online reviews of newly opened restaurants show a time trend in which there are less negative sentiments and fewer words reflecting extreme reviews than long-running restaurants. Our findings provide five major core propositions and five sub propositions we use to advance our hypotheses. We postulate theoretical implications and practical insights in the discussion of this study.