Do Online Friends Bring Out the Best in Us? The Effect of Friend Contributions on Online Review Provision

Online reviews are a crucial source of information for consumer decision making. Many businesses, companies, and platforms are interested in encouraging more consumers to review their products but are dubious about using financial incentives to buy online reviews. Our research describes a social way of growing online reviews. We show that cultivating an online community for reviewing by showing members reviews written by their online friends cannot only increasing their willingness to contribute but also the quality of the resulting reviews. The takeaways of this study include (1) unlike using financial rewards to incentivize review contribution, the studied approach can motivate review contributions without compromising the quality of reviews contributed; (2) the effect of exposing consumers to their friends’ reviews is comparable to that of Yelp’s weekly newsletters (thus this can be a powerful way of motivating consumer reviews); and (3) to effectively leverage friend reviews, online platforms should facilitate social networking among users and build an online community that recognizes and rewards members who make frequent, high-quality contributions to online reviews.