Explaining Reviewing Effort: Existing Reviews as Potential Driver

Online reviews systems try to motivate users to invest effort in writing a review since their success crucially depends on the reviews’ helpfulness. However, other factors might influence future reviewing effort as well. We analyze whether existing reviews matter for future reviewing effort. Analyzing a dataset from Google Maps which covers 40 sights across Europe with over 37,000 reviews, we find that reviewing effort – measured by the propensity to additionally write a textual review and (textual) review length – is negatively related to the number of existing reviews. Further, also the rating distribution of existing reviews matters: If there is a large discrepancy between the existing ratings and the own rating, we observe more additional textual reviews. Our findings provide important implications for review system designers regarding the presentation of review metrics: changing or omitting the display of review metrics for potential reviewers might increase their reviewing effort.