Why Not All Managerial Responses Are Created Equal: A Causal Investigation of Their Effect on Online Review Systems’ Users

Strategic and effective use of online review systems is a critical challenge for firms in the service industry, which can only participate in these systems while abiding by each system’s unique rules and designs. Through an experimental study, we extended the theoretical understanding and explored the practical benefits that firms can receive by writing managerial responses. We showed that topic-congruent responses have a strong positive influence on users’ purchase intention through increased trust and major trust antecedents, such as perceived diagnosticity and social presence. In positive reviews, both perceived diagnosticity and perceived social presence were significant mediators. On the other hand, for negative reviews, the only significant mediation was through perceived social presence. Our work complements previous research on personalized managerial responses, which mostly depends on archival data and does not provide causal insight into the individual mechanism behind the positive effects of writing managerial responses for the firm. The results of our study are useful to any firm that wants to optimize its managerial response strategy in online platforms by providing a detailed explanation of how potential customers can be influenced by the different strategies. We also expand the existing knowledge of how consumers develop trust and purchasing intentions in an electronic commerce environment when exposed to different managerial response strategies.