Positive and Negative Word of Mouth about Restaurants: Exploring the Asymmetric Impact of the Performance of Attributes

Abstract

This study examines the relationship between attribute performance of a restaurant and customers' positive and negative word of mouth (WOM). We present an analysis of 168,262 customer reviews, which consist of an overall rating of a dining experience, ratings of food, physical environment and employee service, and real expenditure for a meal, totally covering 1,542 Chinese restaurants on a restaurant guide website. The results indicate that the performance of attributes has an asymmetric impact on positive and negative WOM for the restaurant industry as well as for low-end and mid-to-high-end restaurants. Our results also show that, in most cases, there is a combined effect of two attributes on both positive and negative WOM.

Keywords:

• word of mouth
• restaurants
• asymmetric
• combined effects

Acknowledgements

The authors thank the anonymous reviewers for providing constructive comments on the earlier versions of this paper. This work presented in this paper was funded by the National Science Foundation of China (71101039) and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (HIT.HSS.201107).