סמינר בשיווק

Title: "The Weekend Effect in Online Reviews“

Authors: Andreas Bayerl, Verena Schoenmueller, Jacob Goldenberg, Florian Stahl

Abstract: The effect of the weekend on individuals’ behaviors and decisions has been established in a variety of domains. In this research the authors contribute to these findings and investigate the effect of weekends in the domain of online reviews. They first establish that reviews written on the weekend carry systematically lower rating scores than reviews written during the week and show the robustness of this “weekend effect” across contexts. The weekend effect of online reviews is surprising given that literature usually reports higher levels of happiness and better mood on weekends. We test an extensive set of potential drivers and find strong evidence that the weekend effect is driven by a temporal reviewer selection, i.e., a different kind of reviewer being active at different times of the week and a general “weekend-loneliness” that worsens ratings written on the weekend. Evidence for these explanations stems from a multimethod approach including secondary data (a quarter billion online reviews from 5 different platforms), a natural experiment, text analysis and a lab study. Given the relevance of online reviews for consumers’ decisions, the authors demonstrate important managerial implications, by showing with solicited reviews from the field, that organizations should not try to trigger users to review on the weekend.

Bio of the speaker: Currently, Dr. Andreas Bayerl is a Postdoc in Quantitative Marketing at the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. Before that, he finished his PhD at the Graduate School of Social and Economic Sciences (GESS) of the University of Mannheim in 2022. His research interests lie in the areas of employee-generated content (EGC), user-generated content (UGC) and influencer marketing. For more information, please refer to his website: https://andreasbayerl.wixsite.com/my-site