Economic Dissimilarity and Online Rating Behavior

Understanding consumers' service evaluation behavior is an important task for businesses to mining values from electronic customer-generated content. This study investigates the influence of economic dissimilarity on consumers' online rating behavior in the catering industry. Though an empirical analysis of online review data for 100 restaurants in 10 large cities in China collected from Dianping, we find a negative influence of a reviewer's economic dissimilarity on her online ratings, indicating that economic development gap between a reviewer's residence and the reviewed restaurant location plays a significant role in a consumer's service evaluation behavior. Moreover, the negative influence is weaker for male consumers than for female consumers; consumers' travel experience exacerbates the negative influence; consumers' review experience mitigates the negative influence. Research conclusions can provide multiple implications for academia and practice.