Exploring the effect of the knowledge redundancy of online reviews on tourism consumer purchase behaviour: based on the knowledge network perspective

ABSTRACT

Online reviews often contain considerable information redundancy. Understanding how to mine and identify valuable information is an important research topic. Based on knowledge-based theory and social network theory, this study discusses the impact of knowledge redundancy in online travel reviews on consumer purchase behaviour from the perspective of knowledge networks. By crawling 943,516 online reviews of 609 tourism products from Trip and Tuniu, we conduct an empirical analysis of the relationships among knowledge redundancy, knowledge diversity and consumer purchase behaviour. The results show that there is a U-shaped relationship between knowledge redundancy in online tourism reviews and consumer purchase behaviour, and knowledge diversity plays an intermediary role in the relationship between knowledge redundancy and consumer purchase behaviour. The results provide valuable and timely insights for the development of the online tourism industry.

KEYWORDS:

• Online reviews
• knowledge networks
• knowledge redundancy
• knowledge diversity
• consumer purchase behaviour

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China [grant number NSFC 71962005]; Humanities and social sciences of “cultivation plan for thousands of young and middle-aged backbone teachers in Universitiesin Guangxi” (grant number 2020QGRW019).