An Experimental Study of How Restaurant-Owners' Responses to Negative Reviews affect Readers' Intention to Visit
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Evans, David; Oviatt, Jill; Slaymaker, Jordan; Tapado, Conrado; Doherty, Patrick; Ball, Amy; Saenz, Dacia; Wiley, Elizabeth
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University of Washington Department of Communication
Abstract
Since 2009, business owners have been able to publicly respond to negative reviews on Yelp, but experts still give very contradictory advice as to what they should say. And to date no experimental studies exist to provide guidance. Graduate students in the University of Washington MCDM program under David Evans, Ph.D. of Psychster Inc. experimentally tested what effect responses to negative reviews have on readers' intention to visit a restaurant. They randomly exposed 259 readers to carefully controlled mockups of a Yelp business profile and gathered their reactions.