The paradoxical dance of consistency and inconsistency: How the interplay of UGC and business profile shapes hotel review usefulness

Given the critical role of hotel review usefulness in influencing customers' hotel booking behavior, academics have conducted extensive research on hotel review usefulness, especially focusing on the impact of review- or/and reviewer-related determinants. Nevertheless, the potential impact of business-related data which works as quality signals to influence hotel customers’ evaluation, remains underexplored. Drawing on information foraging theory, the current study investigates the impact of the interplay of hotel business profiles and online reviews in terms of form and content on review usefulness, harnessing big data analytics and multidimensional fixed-effect models to examine 974,031 reviews and 903 online business profiles. The results reveal paradoxical effects of consistency and inconsistency co-existing between reviews and business profiles. Reviews having a similar format to hotel business profile in terms of language style (i.e., form consistency) impose small information search costs on consumers, thus increasing review usefulness. Reviews with high-degree content inconsistency measured by the dissimilarity of semantic content to profile, which signals more information gain, are perceived to be more useful. Robustness checks support that such effects are pervasive across consumer or hotel types. This study advances research on review usefulness and consumer online information processing. Practical implications for multiple stakeholders are also discussed.