Why Is the Grass Always Greener on the Other Side? Tourist Bias in Online Restaurant Ratings

Online product and service ratings have great value for both sellers and consumers. Prior research, however, often treats online ratings equally even if the individuals who generate these ratings have very different backgrounds. This study examines how tourists differ from locals when they generate online ratings. We find that, relative to locals, tourists exhibit an upward bias when they rate restaurants. More specifically, a consumer as a tourist is at least 13.4% more likely than as a local to give a higher rating (versus all lower ones) to a restaurant. We explore possible mechanisms underlying this tourist bias. Based on data from an online review platform for restaurants, we first confirm the phenomenon of upward tourist bias in online ratings at both reviewer and restaurant levels with multiple robustness checks. Then we conduct a series of analyses from reviewer, restaurant, cuisine, and city levels to identify factors leading to such a bias. We are able to examine the reasons related to consumption pattern such as restaurant price/service/environment, cuisine authenticity, tourists’ evaluation process, differences between city sizes, and so on. We find that individuals’ change in focus (from location, cooking, and price to service, environment, and emotions) and change in evaluation process (from cognitive to affective) can induce the tourist bias in ratings. We also discuss theoretical and practical implications for online review platforms, product retailers, and consumers.

History: Wonseok Oh, Senior Editor; Yuliang Yao, Associate Editor.

Funding: This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China [Grants 72121001, 72571267, 72071038, and 7247030852] and the Hong Kong University Grants Committee through General Research Funds [Grants 14500521, 14504524, and 165052947].

Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/isre.2020.0620.