The Direct Effect of Managerial Responses: When Politeness Backfires

Managerial responses, which represent firms’ public replies to online reviews, are commonly employed in customer communications. Using a dataset collected from a leading mobile game app platform in China, this research examines the effect of managerial responses on the review updates of customers who receive them, that is, the direct effect of managerial responses. Platform users can update their reviews, and complete records of review updates are observable, which allows us to utilize variations in the same customer’s review ratings of a single game both before and after receiving a managerial response. Addressing concerns regarding the endogeneity of managerial responses, improvements in game quality, and censored data in rating updates, we find that users who update their reviews after receiving managerial responses upgrade their ratings by an average of one star. In addition, we find that the positive direct effect of managerial responses is negatively moderated by the level of response politeness, measured separately using both machine learning and large language models. By conducting a survey study, we further show that as the level of politeness increases, the likelihood of reviewers perceiving a managerial response as an attempt to persuade them also increases. These findings highlight the positive direct effect of managerial response and the importance of response style, specifically politeness, which can produce a backfire effect in online communications.