TITLE:
What We Know and Don’t Know about Manager Responses: A Review and Synthesis of the Literature
AUTHORS:
Zhaoxu Fang
KEYWORDS:
Online Reviews, Manager Response, Systematic Review, c2c Interactions, Social Influences
JOURNAL NAME:
Open Journal of Social Sciences,
Vol.8 No.5,
May
8,
2020
ABSTRACT: In the past few years, a large number of scholars have paid attention to
manager responses. Although the existing research has helped us to have a good
understanding of some problems related to manager responses, there are still
some academical and management problems. Moreover, no attempt has been made to
consolidate and synthesize research in this area. As consumers increasingly
rely on online retail, hotel reservation and information search, and the
continuous growth of social media, the importance of manager response cannot be
overemphasized. Based on a systematic review of several studies, we have made a
comprehensive analysis of the manager responses in multiple dimensions, and
raised the current and ongoing research key issues. Companies respond to different
types of reviews (for different types of reviews, different platforms and
different response strategies), which may have different effects (three aspects
of platforms, hotels and consumers), which can be explained by attribution
theory, social learning theory and others. The future research should further
explore whether there are other key influencing factors in the review response,
and try to analyze the reasons why different factors have different influence
from a new theoretical perspective.