Cultural Differences in Online Review Posting Behavior: An Empirical Comparison between Korean and American Consumers

Abstract

Online consumer reviews have become a significant aspect in marketing as many consumers turn to online reviews as a key consideration in their shopping experiences. The widespread phenomenon of online review posting behavior and their great acceptance by consumers suggests that online reviews exert a considerable influence on consumer buying and the sales of products. There is no doubt that online reviews play a crucial role in directly affecting the success of products and services in the market. Notably, there are many global third-party or middleman websites where many international users post reviews and read others’ as well. In these cases, it has recently come to light that online consumer review behavior is affected by one’s nationality. Cultural differences in ways of thinking may influence how the consumer evaluates the product or service. Since the U.S. and South Korea are ranked as leading countries in internet access and usage, we aim to investigate the impact of cultural differences between the U.S. and South Korea on online review posting behavior. We use real online review data collected from a travel website. The dataset consists of all of the reviews from a sample of 1,167 hotels in Seoul on Booking.com. By employing a matching method called the Mahalanobis Distance, we answer whether cultural differences across countries have an impact on review posting behavior in a non-experimental setting.