Identifying the drivers of review generation in business-to-business e-commerce

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Date
2023-08-23
Authors
Banh, Uyen Uyen
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Abstract

Despite the significant larger scale of B2B e-commerce and the importance of online reviews for buyers and sellers in B2B context, research on online review generation primarily focuses on the B2C context. The global expansion also poses a challenge for firms to understand the generation of online reviews beyond national boundaries. Yet, current research on online reviews offers little guidance in this area, as most of the extant research on online reviews has focused on the U.S. or a single country. This dissertation is an attempt to shed light on the limited knowledge of review generation in B2B and in globalization context. Using a large-scale empirical study, I highlight the importance of online reviews, identify their drivers in the B2B context, and examine the effect of national culture on online review generation. In essay 1, I investigate the effects of customer-initiated contacts, relationship duration, free-tiered pricing, and competition on online review generation. I also examine how those effects vary in different situations and investigate the consequence of online review sharing in B2B context. In essay 2, I investigate how individualism and uncertainty avoidance affect the decision to share online reviews and how these national culture's dimensions moderate the effect between customers’ interactions with the firm and online review generation. My research shows that findings from the existing literature (which have primarily been based on a B2C context and a single market) have limited applications to B2B contexts and firms operating in different countries and cultures, and further research is required in these important, yet underexplored areas.

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B2B, Online Reviews, Competition, Customer-Initiated Contacts, Free-Tiered Pricing, Relationship Duration, National Culture
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