Time of day effects on consumers’ online review characteristics: Evidence from the homestay platform

Abstract

Considering the unique mechanism underlying time of day effects due to biological clock on cognition, mood, and behavior, this study seeks to investigate the time of day effects on consumers' online review characteristics in the context of homestay platforms. Mixed approaches were employed, where the textual analysis and econometric analysis were based on the dataset with 189,523 reviews received from Tujia and an online randomized experiment recruited 378 participants. The results show that in the daytime consumers are under high cognitive load and more likely to rely on affective processes rather than cognitive processes when they craft online reviews, and conversely in the nighttime. The emotional expressions extracted from review texts and reflected in online ratings suggest consumers' mood change along time of a day, which further influences their review texts crafting and online ratings posting. Positive (negative) emotions are found to be stronger (weaker) in the daytime than nighttime. This work is conducive to enrichment in extant literature in hospitality academia and numerous rationales and theories in psychology field. Our work suggests important implications for homestay platform operations, hosts' managerial strategies, and consumers’ decision-making.