Offering incentives to stimulate positive online reviews: A critical evaluation

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Ina Garnefeld
• Subject Area: Accounting and Finance
• Term: from 2017 to 2021
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 366085999

Online reviews are an important source of information for customers. As online reviews are ubiquitously accessible and perceived as highly trustworthy in comparison to marketer dominated sources, customers heavily rely on product evaluations of other consumers. Consequently, positive online reviews positively affect customers purchase intention as well as their willingness to pay and as a consequence firm performance. Therefore, firms are concerned with increasing their positive online reviews. One possible strategy to stimulate online reviews is offering incentives for writing online reviews. To do so, companies offer monetary or non-monetary rewards to their customers in return for writing a review. Hereby, they typically do not explicitly state that the online review has to be necessarily positive. As there is no evidence if such an incentive strategy will have the intended consequences and companies will actually profit from an increase in positive online reviews by offering incentives, this strategy seems to be risky. Based on exchange theory and a multi-method approach, the following three research questions will be answered: (a) Will incentives increase the number of published online reviews?, (b) will incentives change the valence of the published online reviews?, and (c) which context factors will influence the relationships between incentives and the number of published reviews as well as their valence? While incentives will likely increase the number of published online reviews, the effect on the valence is less clear. On the one hand, customers might feel gratitude towards the firm for offering incentives. As a consequence customers might want to reciprocate and will write a more positive review. On the other hand, incentives might decrease the positivity of online reviews because customers will anticipate psychological costs if they write a very positive review and receive an incentive. To avoid feelings of being bought, they will negatively adapt their reviews. If and when which kind of incentive strategy is effective for increasing positive online reviews is highly relevant for marketing research and practice.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants