Ucac 003
Ucac 003
Ucac 003
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596 JOURNAL OF CONSUMER RESEARCH
content remains relatively limited and narrow in scope. with information on weather conditions, (ii) at the
Two prominent situational features are social and physical reviewer’s residential address on the day of review provi-
contexts (Belk 1975). Previous studies have predominantly sion, and (iii) at the booked hotel during the stay. By study-
focused on the influence of social context, such as social ing only reviews provided within the first week after the
density (Consiglio, De Angelis, and Costabile 2018), or ex- end of a stay, the study established that consumption and
posure to opinions from others (Godes and Silva 2012; review provision are separated across time and space, such
Moe and Schweidel 2012; Moe and Trusov 2011; that residential weather conditions are unrelated to the
days (i) include, on average, a significantly lower propor- service quality for consumers in regions with more rain
tion of words related to positive affect, (ii) have lower hap- and snow (Mittal, Kamakura, and Govind 2004), a greater
piness scores, (iii) are less positive, overall, and (iv) show preference for products with features compatible with pre-
lower arousal levels. Interestingly, reviews written on rainy vailing weather conditions (e.g., winter clothes on surpris-
days too showed a lower proportion of negative affect- ingly cold days in Conlin, O’Donoghue, and Vogelsang
related words. Additional analyses revealed this effect cor- 2007; convertible cars on sunny days in Busse et al. 2015),
responded with a reduction in negative, high-arousal emo- or for hedonic products that help consumers restore well-
rainy or snowy day. Since positive affect includes feelings one. Schwarz and Clore (1983) found no difference in par-
of excitement, enthusiasm, strength, pride, and activity ticipant mood between participants exposed to positive
(Watson, Clark, and Tellegen 1988), the results of Govind mood manipulation and those in the control group. Even in
et al. (2020) help to explain why individuals are relatively the absence of mood manipulation, participants reported
more optimistic (Howarth and Hoffman 1984) and less being in a rather positive mood. In contrast, mood was sig-
tired (Denissen et al. 2008) on sunny days. On the flip side, nificantly lower after negative mood manipulation than in
people feel relatively less optimistic and less energized on the control group. Similarly, Govind et al. (2020) reported
H2: Bad weather at a consumer’s residential address weather conditions at a consumer’s residential address on
increases the probability that the consumer will write an on- the day of the review were reconstructed. The assumption
line review for a recent hotel stay. was that most consumers returned home within a day of
Taken together, hypotheses 1 and 2 suggest that bad the end date of their vacation,8 and that their domicile is
weather affects both what consumers share with others also the geographical area in which they write their
about their past experiences and whether they share these reviews. To avoid concerns about the heterogeneity of
experiences at all. reviewing behavior across different countries and to ensure
average temperature. Detailed information on the hotel’s Panel (b) of table 1 shows the reconstructed weather
geolocation, as well as data from the NCEI weather ar- conditions at the residential address on the day of review
chive, was collected, which helped to control for the possi- provision for about 92% of all reviews (314,163 out of
bility that bad weather conditions at the residential address 341,494). They show considerable variation: 20% of
were correlated with those at the hotel location. reviews were written on rainy days, 1% on snowy days,
Table 1 presents summary statistics for the dataset, sepa- and 2% on days with rain and snow. The average tem-
rately for the bookings and reviews.10 Panel (a) shows the perature across all review days was 11.58 Celsius, al-
FIGURE 1 (and using search terms in German) for hotel j’s city on
that day.14 Because the intention to help others is a key
VARIABILITY IN WEATHER CONDITIONS ACROSS GERMANY motivation for WOM (Berger 2014), customers are
expected to be more likely to write a review in times with
keen interest in the travel destination:
0 0 0 0 0
pitjr ¼ b0 þ W itr bW þ Bij bB þ Tit bT þ Cr bC þ Gjt bG
Estimation Procedure
Rating score Ratingitjr is observed if customer i decides
to write a review, which is unlikely to be random.
However, estimation of (1) via OLS using 0 0 only0 the ob-
0
served ratings and regressing them on W itr , Bij , Tit , and Cr
is known to give inconsistent estimates of true parameter
values, unless the error terms eitjr and mitjr are uncorrelated.
Note. Weather forecast for Germany for February 14, 2018. Source: www.wet-
teronline.de. Reproduced with permission.
To account for the potential correlation between the errors
in equations 1 and 2, the study applies a variant of
Heckman’s two-step procedure, based on first estimating a
consumer’s probability of writing a review, and then aug-
regional level. Specifically, customer mentality may differ menting the rating score equation 1 by including the esti-
0
across more rainy regions and more sunny regions because mated inverse Mills ratio, kðZitjr b
hÞ, where
customers self-select
0
into their residential areas.13
h i
Subsequently, W i;t;r is extended to include weather condition 0 0 0 0 0 0
Zitr ¼ 1 Witr Bij Tit Cr Gjt ; and
measures at the hotel address during the stay (shares of rainy
and snowy days, and average temperature throughout the b
h ¼ ½b0 bW bB bT bC bG :
stay).
0 0 0 0
Ratingitjr ¼ ~d 0 þ Witr ~d W þ Bij ~d B þ Tit ~d T þ Cir ~d C
0
How Weather Affects Review Provision: Model þ r12 k Zitjr b h þ gitjr (10)
Specification
We model the probability pitjr that consumer i who lives To obtain the inverse Mills ratio, the standard procedure
in residential area r will write a review for the vacation at would be to estimate the review probability from equation 2
hotel j on day t (t ¼ 1, . . ., 7) after the end of the vacation. by a Probit model, and then to construct
In addition to the same set of weather conditions at the 0
consumer’s residential address on day t, booking character- 0 / Zitjrbh
istics, customer characteristics, and review-provision time k Zitjr b
h ¼ 0 , where /ðÞ denotes the standard
UðZitjrb
hÞ
characteristics as in equation 1, we follow Moe and
Schweidel (2012), and include, for each day t, information 14 We considered collecting Google search trends directly on the ho-
tel level. However, most of the 18K hotels in the dataset had zero
on the historical Google search activity from Germany search hits on any given day. Therefore, search trends on the city
level were included. This also reflects on anecdotal evidence that
13 Alternatively, the region fixed effects can also be considered as consumers first choose which city to travel to, and then select a hotel
controls for differences in average weather conditions across differ- at the location. Accordingly, interest in the location initially drives a
ent regions. customer’s information search.
602 JOURNAL OF CONSUMER RESEARCH
TABLE 1
SUMMARY STATISTICS
normal density, and UðÞ is the associated cumulative dis- procedure (Correia 2017).15 This command implements an
tribution function. However, because of the increased com- efficient and feasible estimator for linear models with
putational intensity of the Probit model, and because of the high-dimensional fixed effects, which augments the fixed-
very large number of fixed effects in the model (the most point iteration of Guimaraes and Portugal (2010) and
comprehensive specification for review provision equa- Gaure (2013), and has the advantages of speed over other
tion 2 includes more than 82,000 fixed effects), similar to algorithms and the flexibility to adjust standard errors for
the previous literature (Pope and Schweitzer 2011), a linear clustering at both the hotel and residential area levels.
probability model (LPM) was used, instead of the Probit
model, to estimate equation 2, as is frequently done in em- 15 This algorithm is widely used, as is evident from more than 250
pirical economics when there are many fixed effects in the citations of Correia (2017) as of April 2021. Studies using this algo-
rithm have recently been published in top-tier academic journals,
model (Bartling, Brandes, and Schunk 2015). Specifically, such as the American Economic Review (Deryugina et al. 2019), or
equation 2 was estimated using Stata’s reghdfe estimation the Journal of Financial Economics (Luck and Zimmermann 2020).
BRANDES AND DOVER 603
0
Based on these estimates, we constructed k Zitjr b
h LPM as 0.10 stars lower on average. Relative to the standard devia-
tion in rating scores (0.85), this was a 12% change.
above. Column 2 in table 2 presents the estimation results from
To estimate the augmented rating score equation 10 , the an extended model specification that includes controls for
reghdfe algorithm was also used. The use of a linear model weather conditions at the hotel address during the custom-
is appropriate for the analysis of rating scores because av- er’s stay, which finds a 0.10-star reduction on days with
erage rating scores between integer values (e.g., 3.3) were any form of rain at a customer’s residential address. In ad-
b 12 (the estimated coefficient of
observed in the dataset. If r
TABLE 2
Relative to the unconditional, mean daily review probabil- the hotel’s city is very high. Column 4 results support hy-
ity of 0.017, customers were 6.5% and 5.3% more likely to pothesis 2.
write a review on days with rain and days with rain and
snow, respectively. Measured in terms of the daily standard
deviation (0.13), rain increases review probability by 0.9%.
Effects of Bad Weather on Review Text
For the exclusion restriction variable, Google search activ- Given the observed negative effect of bad weather on
ity, there was a significant nonlinear effect, such that con- review scores, it was important to know if this was associ-
sumers are more likely to write a review when interest in ated with a corresponding negative effect on emotionality
BRANDES AND DOVER 605
in the review text itself. Besides being directly relevant in a subcategory. In all other specifications, the dependent
for consumer decision-making (Humphreys and Wang variable was the overall rating of emotionality in a subcate-
2018; Ludwig et al. 2013), weather-related changes in the gory. In column 1, reviews written on bad weather days
review text may provide some hints about the mechanism contained fewer words in LIWC’s positive emotion subca-
of the review score effect. Specifically, under the mood- tegory. This effect holds for all three types of precipitation.
related mechanism, customers were expected to be, on av- Relative to the overall standard deviation of the proportion
erage, less happy, and write less positively or more nega- of positive affect (5.90), these indicate reductions of 4.5%,
TABLE 3
Other Effects of Rainy Weather on Review with this expectation, we found a 20% increase for words
Content in the subcategory of “cognitive processes” [e.g., denken
(think), wissen (know)] for reviews written on rainy days.
The previous section focused on the dimensions of the To explore further changes in the reviewers’ cognition
review text theoretically most closely related to the pro- process on rainy days, three additional patterns were se-
posed mechanism’s influence on cognitive content—the in- lected, as identified by prior research on mood and cogni-
fluence of rain on what customers think during reviewing.
tion (Forgas 2013); negative mood (i) results in more
This section reports evidence from a post hoc analysis of
detailed descriptions of past events, (ii) leads to more per-
additional LIWC dimensions to provide more insights on
suasive arguments, and (iii) promotes a greater focus on
the consumer’s mindset, or how customers think when
others than on the self. These patterns were the focus be-
posting on rainy days.17 The results are displayed in table 4
cause they have been shown to improve review helpfulness
panel (b).
and influence (Filieri 2015; Wang and Karimi 2019). To
In addition to their effect on cognitive content, moods
have also been demonstrated to influence the process of assess whether consumers on rainy days write more de-
cognition in several ways (Forgas 2017). For example, neg- tailed reviews (i), a large number of LIWC subcategories
ative mood makes people more likely to use more effortful were considered, including words per sentence (as a proxy
and systematic information processing strategies. Under for increased details per sentence), prepositions, functional
the proposed mood-related mechanism, reviews written on words, common verbs, common adjectives, comparisons,
rainy days were expected to be characterized by a more numbers, and quantifiers. There was evidence for increased
careful and deliberate cognitive thinking style. Consistent use of words in all these dimensions, except common
adjectives, on rainy days.
17 We are grateful to the Associate Editor for suggesting this further To evaluate review persuasiveness (ii), the study focused
analysis to us. on the two subdimensions of “certainty” and “authenticity”
BRANDES AND DOVER 607
TABLE 4
Review content dimensions Change on rainy days Change on snowy days Change on days with rain and snow
(supposed to measure honesty), because both concepts in- Effects of Bad Weather on Review Scores:
crease persuasiveness (Haran and Shalvi 2020; Karmarkar Robustness Checks
and Tormala 2010), which makes these results highly rele-
vant for the impact of online reviews. Reviews written on The empirical analyses showed sizable effects of the in-
rainy days scored higher on both subdimensions. To assess fluence of bad weather on review content and provision.
a customer’s change in focus (i.e., (iii)), we compared the This section demonstrates the robustness of the previous
use of first-person singular [ich (I)] against second-person findings for a number of alternative specifications in two
[du (you [singular]), ihr (you [plural])] pronouns. We steps. First, table 5 demonstrates the robustness of the
expected a relative increase in second-person versus first- results when omitting back-to-back bookings, and when
person singular pronouns. The results showed that first- allowing the effect of residential weather conditions to dif-
person singular pronouns were used significantly less on fer across hotel star categories and customer gender. In all
rainy days, but there was no change in the use of second- the additional analyses, the focus remains on the effects of
person ones. bad weather on review behavior in the first seven days after
Finally, the study provides additional evidence for the travel. To illustrate the sensitivity of our results when
argument that consumers have less time constraints on bad changing this cutoff value, the second part of this section
weather days. Review length, measured by the total word contains the results when we extend [restrict] our analysis
count in the reviews, was 99 words longer on average to the first 10 [four] days after travel.
when written on a rainy versus sunny day. Relative to the In table 5, columns 1 and 2 report the estimation results
standard deviation, this marked an increase of approxi- for rating scores and review provision when excluding
mately 50%. The results from the ex-post analysis are back-to-back bookings (those when a customer left for an-
largely consistent with the literature on the effect of nega- other trip within the first week after the end of the focal
tive mood on the process of cognition, lending further trip). As previously mentioned, such back-to-back book-
credibility to the proposed theoretical mechanism in this ings are relatively rare and account for only 7.5% of all
study. bookings in our sample. As the results show, dropping
608 JOURNAL OF CONSUMER RESEARCH
TABLE 5
these bookings from the sample left our results unaltered. same customer (94.5% of customers reviewed at most
In a second robustness check, we investigated whether the twice during our sample period), in combination with our
negative influence of bad weather on rating scores affected two-step estimation approach, prevented us from doing
all hotels’ quality tiers equally. Column 3 in table 5 reports so.18 Therefore, the study focused on observable types of
the estimation results from an expanded rating score
model, in which we included interaction terms between a
18 We conducted several analyses that revealed severe multicolli-
hotel’s number of stars and bad weather variables. As the nearity problems (based on variance inflation factors) between the in-
results show, we did not find evidence that the influence of verse Mills ratio control and other explanatory controls when running
bad weather differs across hotel quality tiers. models only for customers with multiple reviews. For example, mul-
In another robustness check, the goal was to address po- ticollinearity was found to be a considerable problem when trying to
control for average rating scores from past reviews in the rating equa-
tential concerns about unobserved customer heterogeneity. tion. It was also a problem in a model that included multiple controls
Unfortunately, the sparsity of repeated reviews from the for observable heterogeneity (e.g., age and gender).
BRANDES AND DOVER 609
customer heterogeneity and on the moderating effect of results provide further support for H2. Column 6, however,
gender. Column 4 in table 5 shows that the results on the revealed a significant positive effect (þ0.043) of rain on
star rating are robust to the inclusion of a gender control rating scores, and thus contradicted H1. A number of addi-
variable in both the review provision and rating equation. tional analyses were conducted to understand the differen-
However, the results provide a novel result that men tend ces in the results, particularly, the extent to which this
to evaluate more negatively than women. Column 5 reports difference could be explained by (a) the smaller number of
the results from a specification in which we interacted fo- observations and/or (b) differences in customer behavior
TABLE 6
EFFECTS OF BAD WEATHER ON ONLINE REVIEWS: ROBUSTNESS ACROSS NUMBER OF DAYS AFTER END OF TRAVEL
findings from a uniquely constructed dataset that combines studies have either demonstrated cross-channel effects on
more than 12 years of rich hotel booking and review data customer engagement with firm-generated content
with detailed information on weather conditions at a cus- (Andrews et al. 2016; Li et al. 2017), or only within-
tomer’s residential and hotel addresses demonstrate that channel effects of offline external stimuli (e.g., product vis-
bad weather in a reviewer’s offline physical surroundings ibility) on the sharing of offline user-generated content
influences online reviews. The consistent results on review (Berger and Iyengar 2013; Berger and Schwartz 2011). By
text sentiment from three different analysis tools provide studying all major aspects of online reviews (volume, va-
evidence for the theoretical mechanism: bad weather lence, and text), we demonstrate that external situational
reduces positive affect for consumers, which translates into stimuli may affect not only consumers’ engagement, but
less positive hotel evaluations. The findings have important also their evaluative judgment and expression style.
implications for scholars and practitioners. Second, this study advances the understanding of con-
sumer WOM by showing that online review content can be
Theoretical Implications affected by a priori irrelevant and random events, such as
For scholars, our research makes three important contri- detrimental weather conditions on the day the review is
butions. First, we demonstrate a novel cross-channel effect provided. Specifically, this effect can exist even days after
in which an offline stimulus affects online behavior—on- consumption. Other studies have focused on the effects of
line review provision. The results reveal that weather con- social context. For example, in a recent series of experi-
ditions, as an example of a prominent situational factor in a ments, Brannon and Samper (2018) showed that one-on-
consumer’s physical environment, may affect both sharing one, post-consumption discussions with other consumers
and content of online user-generated reviews. Existing can affect consumer evaluations. We observed a physical
BRANDES AND DOVER 611
context effect, rather than a social context effect, in real- In particular, platforms should integrate weather forecast
life large data. In addition, our setting differed from that of data with their customer records and send out solicitation
Brannon and Samper (2018) because we studied online emails on rainy days. Consumers are more likely to write
reviews, as a “broadcasting” channel, whereas they studied reviews on bad weather days, indicating that emails on
face-to-face, offline interactions as a “narrowcasting” such days are likely to be more effective. However, the in-
channel (Barasch and Berger 2014). Finally, we discussed creased number of reviews is not the only benefit of this
how bad weather affects not only product evaluations but approach. In addition, these solicited reviews will be lon-
rain spell of three to four days across a country or region alternative explanation of mood congruency (Bower 1981).
may have a substantial impact on a hotel’s set of relevant Future research could rule out alternative explanations and
reviews for consumers. Moreover, recent evidence demon- deeply investigate the phenomenon using controlled
strates that a negative first review for a product can have experiments.
long-term negative effects on the product’s rating valence Another limitation of this work’s estimation approach is
and volume (Park, Shin, and Xie 2021). Accordingly, our its reliance on the assumption that consumers return home
results are particularly relevant for new businesses. promptly after their vacation. While the results are robust
and Google Drive (Yaniv Dover) folders, and secure copies Evaluations,” Journal of Consumer Research, 45 (4),
are also stored on both authors’ professional computers. 810–32.
BrightLocal (2020), “Local Consumer Review Survey 2020,”
https://bit.ly/3p4xMHc [accessed April 29, 2021].
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