The role of review responses in shaping online review content and review space dynamics

Abstract Communication on online review platforms has Please check if the affiliations are captured and presented correctly and amend if necessarytraditionally involved reviewers detached from the entities under review. However, many platforms have now introduced the capability for targets (e.g., business owners) to respond directly to reviews, thereby transforming the nature of interactions within review spaces. This change indicates that reviewers may now engage with both a general audience and the review targets themselves. To address this shift, this study explores how targets’ responses influence subsequent reviews by investigating changes in review characteristics such as length, cognitive content, and affective expression. Yelp and TripAdvisor have permitted businesses to respond to reviews since 2009; thus, data from these platforms were used to employ a difference-in-differences model to analyze the impact of response intensity, response diversity, and review-response similarity on subsequent review attributes. Our findings indicate that greater response intensity and diversity are positively associated with the length of the text and the cognitive language used in subsequent reviews. Moreover, higher review-response similarity enhances the affective tone of subsequent reviews. These results highlight the complex impact of review responses from the reviewed targets on review space by changing platforms’ information quality and relationship dynamics.