Distance and Discrepancy in Online Reviews: How Temporal and Tone Gaps Influence Managerial Response Behavior

Online managerial responses to consumer reviews benefit businesses. However, given time, personnel, and budget constraints, managers facing numerous reviews must decide which to respond to and how. Our findings suggest that the content, linguistic characteristics, and contextual features of online reviews significantly shape managerial response behavior. Reviews that are highly relevant to product and service attributes, as well as those with lower sentiment or readability, increase managers’ likelihood of responding. Additionally, several relevance dimensions and linguistic complexity encourage standardized responses, whereas experience-related reviews are related to more customized responses. Contextual factors further moderate these effects: greater temporal distance, measured as the time gap between the review posting date and the consumption date, strengthens the impact of review relevance on response likelihood but reduces the influence of sentiment and relevance on both responsiveness and response strategy. Moreover, greater tone distance, measured by the discrepancy between ratings and sentiment in textual comments, amplifies the effect of negative sentiment on managerial responses while weakening the effect of review relevance on the preference for standardized replies. Our findings urge managers to consider the content and contextual features of online reviews when developing effective responses that generate positive electronic word of mouth to benefit businesses.