EXPRESS: Customers’ Review Content and Their Referral and (Re)Purchase Behaviors

Abstract

This research examines how customer review content influences review writers’ subsequent decisions. Employing a mixed-methods approach, including a field experiment, a scenario experiment, and archival data analysis, the authors investigated the effects of affective content, cognitive content, and length of customers’ reviews on their subsequent referral and (re)purchase behaviors across various contexts, such as household services, podcast trials, and airline services. The authors leveraged the random assignment of experimental interventions and other shifters to induce exogenous variation in review content features. Additionally, they employed instrumental and proxy variables to address endogeneity issues. Findings from the three studies consistently demonstrate that affective content in reviews enhances referral and repurchase behaviors, whereas cognitive content exerts adverse effects. Moderation analyses show that the effects of review length on these behavioral outcomes depend on individual and contextual factors that affect customers’ elaboration likelihood during review writing. Overall, this research provides actionable insights for strategically shaping customer review content to drive critical business outcomes and enriches theoretical understanding of how content features of customer reviews affect review writers’ decisions.