Attention Externalities in Collective Complaints: How Platform Aggregation Reallocates Response Effort and Creates Unequal Satisfaction Outcomes

Digital complaint platforms reshape negative word-of-mouth by aggregating grievances into visible collective complaint events. We examine how collective negative word-of-mouth (C-NWOM) affects post-complaint satisfaction in a dual-channel complaint environment, distinguishing aggregate satisfaction from individual complainants’ satisfaction outside the collective event. Using large-scale data from China’s leading automotive complaint platform, we document contrasting satisfaction outcomes: C-NWOM is associated with higher overall satisfaction but lower satisfaction among individual complainants of the same model. Drawing on the attention-based view, we explain this pattern as an attention externality: C-NWOM redirects managerial attention toward collective complaints and away from concurrent individual complaints, reducing response speed and prototypicality and thereby contributing to lower individual complainant satisfaction. This negative spillover is strongest during a model’s first C-NWOM shock and attenuates after firms accumulate C-NWOM experience. Our findings inform platform design by revealing how mechanisms that amplify collective voice can create inequities in service recovery for individual complainants.