21

Cultural Differences in Online Review

Posting Behavior: An Empirical
Comparison between Korean and
American Consumers
Jong Min Kim1, Mina Jun, & Jennifer Kim

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.

Keywords: Consumer Online review, Cultural comparison, Korean consumer,

U.S. consumer, Travel website, Mahalanobis

1 Jong Min Kim is Assistant Professor, Business Administration, University of Science and Technology
of China, China, (e-mail:jxk101020@gmail.com).
Mina Jun (Corresponding author) is Visiting Scholar. Marshall School of Business, University of
Southern California (e-mail: mj_955@usc.edu).
Jennifer Kim is Undergraduate Student/ Research Scholar, Pepperdine University, USA,
(e-mail:jennifer.h.kim@pepperdine.edu)

ACADEMY OF ASIAN BUSINESS REVIEW ISSN: 2384-3454 / 16 / $10.00

Vol. 2, No.1. JUNE 2016 ⓒ Academy of Asian Business 2016
22 ACADEMY OF ASIAN BUSINESS REVIEW, JUNE 2016

By the year 2020, the number of consumers browsing and buying online will hit
270 million. Online sales in the U.S. are expected to amount to $523 billion in the
next five years, up 56% from $335 billion in 2015 (Forrester Research Inc.)
(Lindner 2016). Online consumers are increasingly putting their trust in online
reviews to make their purchasing decisions. According to a 2015 survey by
BrightLocal, 92% of consumers stated that they trusted online reviews as much as
personal recommendations (DeMers 2015). Online consumer reviews have become
a significant factor in marketing, due to many consumers looking to online reviews
as a crucial part of their shopping experiences. The widespread phenomenon of
online review communications and great acceptance by consumers suggests that
online reviews exert a considerable influence on consumer buying and on the sales
of products and services (Stauss 1997). Undoubtedly, online reviews play a crucial
role in impacting the success of products and services in the market (Dellarocas,
Zhang and Awad 2007).
Many researchers have proven the strong effect of online reviews on consumer
purchases and sales. For example, Chevalier and Mayzlin (2006) posit that online
reviews have a significant effect on book sales on Amazon.com. Notably, there are
many global third-party websites where many international users leave reviews and
read other reviews, such as Amazon, Yelp, and TripAdvisor. In these cases, it has
been recently recognized that online consumer review behavior is affected by
nationality (Fang et al. 2013; Park and Lee 2009; Koh et al. 2010; He et al. 2012).
Cultural differences in ways of thinking may influence how the consumer evaluates
the product and service (McCort and Malhotra 2009; Monga and John 2007; Park
and Lee 2009). In this way, culture can act as a barrier for generalizing the findings
and thus researchers should consider the observed similarities and differences
between cultures. For example, Park and Lee (2009) proved their conceptual model
linking consumer characteristics, attitude toward online reviews, and the outcome
of online reviews and compared the model between US consumers and Korean
consumers. Their major findings were that the impact of usage frequency of online
reviews is greater for US consumers than for Korean consumers; US consumers’
reading of reviews correlates with their buying from the website where the reviews
are written. However, Korean consumers are more sensitive to online reviews with
regards to purchase intentions than US consumers. Similarly, cross-cultural studies
have examined differences in online review behaviors between Western and East
Asian cultures. Therefore, it can be expected that there would be notable
differences between Korea and the U.S., the two countries that form the context for
the empirical analysis to come. With its high-speed internet and growing internet
 Cultural Differences in Online Review Posting Behavior 23

access to the public, Korea has a crucial environment for cross-cultural research on
electronic-word-of-mouth (hereafter, e-WOM) (Park and Lee 2009). The National
Office for the Information Economy index shows key countries across various
internet-related indicators. Korea and the U.S. are ranked as leading countries in
internet usage (Pearce 2002). Although several cultural comparison issues have
been examined in the fields of online consumer behavior and review posting
behavior, very few of them have compared Korea and the U.S. (Fang et al. 2013;
Koh et al. 2010; He et al. 2012). It would be interesting to provide implications
from comparing online review posting behaviors between the two countries.
In this paper, we aim to investigate the impact of cultural differences between the
U.S. and 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. Our research contributes to
online marketing communication literature by developing hypotheses based on
cultural comparisons and by empirically validating them. The use of the
Mahalanobis Distance in explaining cultural differences between two countries can
contribute significantly to methodology in cross-cultural studies.
The rest of the article is organized as follows: First, we discuss the existing
literature on online review behavior and cultural comparison and develop
hypotheses on online review posting behavior between the two nations. In the
empirical section, we delve into our methodology and findings. Following this, we
cover conclusions, limitations and future research directions.

Literature Reviews and Hypothesis

Differences in Level of Review Ratings

According to Kim, Schimmack, and Oishi (2012), North American culture

promotes positive biases in both self- and other-perceptions and evaluations. Truly,
we think it is likely that the encouragement of positive thinking in North American
culture (Ehrenreich 2009) and the tendency of North Americans to praise each
other more (Kitayama and Markus 2000) foster positive general evaluative biases.
For example, North American parents are more likely to center on their children’s
strong points and compliment them more compared to Asian parents (Oishi and
Sullivan 2005). Similarly, such positive lens may be used when people evaluate
objects including products and services. Perhaps Western consumers tend to focus
on positive aspects of products or services rather than negative aspects about them.
24 ACADEMY OF ASIAN BUSINESS REVIEW, JUNE 2016

Many cultural differences can be conceptualized as variations in human cognitive

processes. Kim, Schimmack, and Oishi (2012) suggest that the goal of self-
perception can be divided into two: having accurate perceptions of reality and
maximizing hedonic balance. In other words, people seek to strike the balance
between possibly negative and positive feelings (Epstein 1991). In many situations,
these goals are aligned; for example, people solve difficult problems that occur in
their reality while they try to enjoy positive events in their lives at the same time.
Cultural factors can influence the degree to which individuals value realism or
hedonism. Cross-national comparisons suggest that hedonism is relatively more
important than realism in North America than in other parts of the world (Diener,
Suh, Smith, and Shao 1995; Heine, Lehman, Markus, and Kitayama 1999; Markus
and Kitayama 1991; Suh et al., 1998). Hence, this reinforces our hypothesis that
US consumers will tend to leave more positive feedback due to their emphasis on
positivity than Korean consumers.
Therefore, we propose the following hypothesis.

H1: US customers tend to be positively predisposed when posting reviews

for hotels in Korea.

The Heterogeneity of Evaluation Rating

As we have discussed the varying levels of evaluation expected for Western and
East Asian consumers, we will now address how cultural differences between US
and Korea can influence the heterogeneity of evaluation rating. More specifically,
we expect less heterogeneity in the level of evaluations by US consumers.
Nisbett et al. (2001) suggest that there are cross-cultural differences in ways of
thinking and cognitive processing. Because East Asians are part of many social
relationships, they tend to focus on the context and pay attention to the relationship
between objects. On the other hand, Westerners tend to see an object as
independent of its context and evaluate it on its own. In this way, East Asian
cultures encourage holistic thinking, while Western cultures encourage analytic
thinking. Holistic thinking is defined as “involving an orientation to the context or
field as a whole, including attention to relationships between a focal object and the
field, and a preference for explaining and predicting events on the basis of such
relationships” (Nisbett et al. 2001, p:293). Analytic thinking “involves a
detachment of the object from its context, a tendency to focus on attributes of the
 Cultural Differences in Online Review Posting Behavior 25

object to assign it to categories, and a preference for using rules about the
categories to explain and predict the object’s behavior” (Nisbett et al. 2001, p: 293).
In other words, Asians are more likely to be influenced by their contexts, which
can affect the overall consistency of evaluations of services or products.
In line with this notion, our claim can be strengthened by the cultural differences
in “communication style.” Americans tend to communicate with a logical,
scientific, data-oriented, and direct style, whereas Asians tend to communicate in a
more intuitive, subjective, and generally less data-oriented way (Lin 1993). Asians
may review and evaluate the product and services based on a less data-oriented
perspective to a greater degree than Americans.
Therefore, we propose the following hypothesis.

H2: There is less heterogeneity in the reviews left by US customers.

Method
Data

To investigate the impact of cultural differences across countries (the US and

South Korea) on review posting behavior, we used online review data collected
from a travel website. The dataset consists of all reviews from a sample of 1,167
hotels in Seoul on Booking.com. We collected all of the review content for every
hotel, as well as some basic hotel information such as address, star-ratings assigned
by the site and the customer review scores, from May of 2014 through May of
2016. The information listed along with each review were the following: reviewer
nationality, review post count by the reviewer, review date, type of trip, travel
companion specifics, the type of room stayed in, how many days the reviewer
stayed, and whether the review was posted using a mobile device. After omitting
observations that had missing values, the final dataset was comprised of 134,962
reviews.

Hotel-level data. In Table 1, we provide the summary description of the sample

for the hotels in Seoul. There are two types of ratings that reflect the quality of
hotels: star-ratings assessed objectively and average review scores assessed by
consumers. The table shows the sample for the hotels in Seoul whose star-ratings
(as evaluated by Booking.com) represent the quality level of the hotels. About 65%
26 ACADEMY OF ASIAN BUSINESS REVIEW, JUNE 2016

of the hotels had star-ratings less than or equal to 2, and about 66% of reviews had
average review scores greater than 7.2 out of a maximum score of 10. Although
many hotels in Seoul had a low number of stars (scored by Booking.com), many
customers still left high average scores for those hotels.

TABLE 1
Summary Statistics of Hotels and Review Score Information

Variables N Percentage

Number of Hotels 1,167 N/A

Number of 1.0-star hotels 332 28.45%
Number of 2.0-star hotels 435 37.28%
Number of 3.0-star hotels 257 22.02%
Number of 4.0-star hotels 70 6.00%
Number of 5.0-star hotels 38 3.26%
Number of unrated hotels 35 3.00%
The average of review scores 6.56 N/A
Number of average review score <= 7.2 392 33.59%
7.2 < Number of average review score <= 8.4 423 36.24%
8.4 < Number of average review score 352 30.17%

Customer-level data. Table 2 shows the distribution of customer reviews for

hotels. About 68% of customers gave review scores greater than 7.5, and a
bout 85.31% of the reviews fell under the category of Leisure Trip. Additio
nally, we found that most people prefer to travel solo (33.02%) or as a gro
up (29.28%). Customers from 163 countries left online reviews. Among the
134,962 reviews, 42% were left using a mobile device.
 Cultural Differences in Online Review Posting Behavior 27

TABLE 2
Distribution of Customer Reviews

Variables N Percentage

Number of Customer reviews 134,962 N/A

Number of review scores <= 7.5 43,507 32.24%
7.5 < Number of review scores <= 9 36,632 27.14%
9 < Number of review scores <= 10 54,823 40.62%
Number of Business Trips 19,820 14.69%
Number of Leisure Trips 115,142 85.31%
Number of Couples Trips 30,885 22.88%
Number of Family Trips 19,619 14.54%
Number of Group Trips 39,523 29.28%
Number of Trips with Friends 376 0.28%
Number of Solo Trips 44,559 33.02%
Number of reviews left via mobile 57,689 42.74%
Number of reviews not left via mobile 77,273 57.26%
Number of each Customer Nationality 163 N/A

Methodology
Our area of interest is the impact of cultural differences across countries on
review posting behavior in a non-experimental setting. We use a matching method
called the Mahalanobis distance to capture the differences in review posting using
online review data from the online travel website Booking.com. This approach has
been employed in management by Flammer (2015), who has examined whether
corporate social responsibility (CSR) is influenced by the market competition of a
product. The author has tried to ensure similarity of the control firm to the treated
firms by matching the treated companies with control firms.
If a random sample of online customer reviews can be used, comparing the review
postings of two culturally different groups is the best way to study the systematic
differences between customers with cultural differences in review posting behavior.
However, the biggest concern in identifying the systematic differences between
customers lies in sample selection bias, which usually exists in a non-random
sample, such as those from travel sites. For example, it is possible that foreigners
28 ACADEMY OF ASIAN BUSINESS REVIEW, JUNE 2016

who travel through South Korea are more likely to stay at higher-end hotels than
the locals due to information limitations for hotels in the area. Because of this
tendency, the distribution of online reviews of hotels in Seoul from foreigners
could be quite different from that of Koreans. This can cause the foreign customers'
review averages for hotels to be higher than those of Korean nationals.
Therefore, the observed difference in the customer review average of the two
groups is the true difference plus selection bias. By matching samples, we are
trying to make the two groups with different cultural backgrounds as similar as
possible, so as to negate the bias, making the cultural impacts on review posting
behavior investigable. Once matches are paired, we compare the differences in
review posting behavior between the group of US and the Korean group. The
following describes our procedure for matching the treatment and control groups.

Treatment group. The treatment group is comprised of reviews left by US

customers who stayed at one of the hotels in South Korea. The Mahalanobis
matching method produces 744 US customer reviews that meet the following
matching criteria.

Control group. The control group consists of the same number of reviews, but
from Korean customers, that matched with the corresponding reviews left by the
US customers. To construct the sample of the reviews of Korean customers who
are similar to the treated customers (except in nationality), we match each US
customer review from the treated group on the basis of hotel- and customer-level
characteristics using the following procedure.
It is difficult to regard the two groups as similar if the hotels where the treated
customers stayed are different from those that the Korean customers stayed at.
Because of this, we first require that the customers of both groups stayed in the
same hotels. However, even if the treated and the control customers stayed in the
same hotels, their reviews could still be influenced by the type of room they stayed
in. For example, it is natural to assume that the experience of the customer who
stayed in a business deluxe room is quite different from that of another customer
who stayed in an executive suite, regardless of both staying at the same hotel, “The
Westin Chosun Hotel Seoul.” For this reason, we place the restriction that both
groups must have stayed in the same room-type as well as the same hotel. Along
with this, because the previous study by Burtch and Hong (2014) maintains that
there are significant differences in review posting generated on mobile and non-
mobile devices, the treated and the control groups should also have used the same
 Cultural Differences in Online Review Posting Behavior 29

type of device when posting their review. In addition, the trip type and the
reviewer's chosen travel companion should be the same in order to control the
(traveler) segment, because it is known that different wants, needs and travel
patterns are dependent on the type of trip1.
It is well-known that previous experience with products has a critical influence on
post-purchase evaluation (Etkin and Sela 2016). This brings us to the second step
of our procedure. To control for the impact of previous experience, we matched the
length of the customers' visit between the treated and the control groups. With this,
out of the remaining candidates, we selected the nearest neighbor on the basis of
two additional customer-level characteristics: the number of previous reviews left
by the customer and review date. The number of previous reviews left by the
customers represents the reviewer’s experience with respect to review posting;
review date was selected because the quality of a hotel’s room changes over time.
The nearest neighbor was the Korean customer review with the lowest
Mahalanobis distance2 to the review of an US citizen across the two matching
characteristics. By doing this, we tried to ensure that the chosen Korean customer
review is as similar as possible to the review of left by the US customer ex ante.

Dependent variables. We are interested in detecting the impacts of cultural

differences between countries (US and Korea) on review posting behavior. It can
be assumed that Korean customers have a tendency to base their reviews on the
negative aspects of their experience rather than the positive ones. Therefore, their
reviews will lean more to the negative when compared to the reviews left by the
US customers, who tend to have a positive predisposition that leads them to focus
on the more positive aspects. To capture this phenomenon in review posting
tendencies, we first compared the difference in the average review scores of the
matched reviews between US and Korean customers.

1
http://www.e-marketingassociates.com/understanding-differences-business-vs-leisure-tra
velers/
2
Given the condition that hotel, type of room, device posted from, type of trip, tra
vel companion spcifics, and the length of the customer’s visit are the same, the Ma
halanobis distance between a review left by an US customer and a review from a
Korean customer is defined as dis.  [( yt  yc )' ] 1 ( yt  yc )]1/ 2 where y is a v
ector of two variables such as the number of previous reviews and the review date,
and ∑ is the (2*2) covariance matrix.
30 ACADEMY OF ASIAN BUSINESS REVIEW, JUNE 2016

Second, it is already established that Asians may evaluate the product and
services based on intuition, tend to be more subjective, and view things from a less
data-oriented perspective than Americans (Lin 1993). It should also be noted that
events, positive or negative, will have a stronger impact on the Asian perspective
(Oishi et al. 2007). Thus, we can expect the Korean customer's evaluation of
experiences of services or products to span toward the extremes and be more varied.
To measure the difference in heterogeneity in the reviews left by US and Korean
customers, we used the following absolute distance concept from the average
review ratings for each hotel:
abs _ dis tan ceijl | rewiew _ scoreijl  average _ review _ socreijl |
where i = customer, j = treated and control group, l = hotel
Having calculated the two dependent variables for the treated and matched
reviews left by US and Koran customers, we tried to capture the impacts of cultural
differences between US and Koreans customers on review posting behavior by
estimating the following regression:
Dependent _ var iableijl     * nationalityijl   * X jl  error _ term
where i = customer, j = treated and control group, l = hotel,
X is the vector of hotel-level dummy variables
Dependent_variables are (1) The average review scores and (2) Absolute distance.

Empirical Results
We begin by examining the impact of cultural differences between two
nationalities, US and Korea. Table 3 shows the regression results for our first
hypothesis tests. Each column in the table represents a separate regression with
different control variables. In the first column, the regression only included the
nationality dummy serving as the explanatory variable with the constant. In the
second column, in order to control the non-linear effect of the quality of hotels on
the review scores, we also incorporated a vector of dummy variables for star-
ratings. In the third column, we also included hotel dummy variables to control
hotel-level heterogeneity.
The first column demonstrates the impact of nationality on the review score.
Consistent with our hypothesis, we found that the review scores left by US
customers, on average, are higher than those left by Korean customers
(βnationality= 0.39***). That is, US customers tend to be positively predisposed
when posting reviews for hotels in Korea. We again observe the same results which
 Cultural Differences in Online Review Posting Behavior 31

further support our first hypothesis in the second and the third columns. These
results reveal that US customers tend to base their reviews on the satisfactory
rather than unsatisfactory aspects of their hotel experiences. This tendency leads
US customers to leave reviews with higher scores than the Korean customers.

TABLE 3
Does Cultural Difference between Countries Lead to a Difference in Review Score?

Dependent Variable Review Score Review Score Review Score

Nationality 0.39*** 0.39*** 0.39***
(US=1,Korea=0) (0.08) (0.08) (0.08)
7.86*** 8.67***
Hotel_Stars=1.0 No
(0.31) (0.75)
8.22*** 8.95***
Hotel_Stars =2.0 No
(0.11) (0.77)
8.03*** 8.15***
Hotel_Stars =3.0 No
(0.09) (0.48)
8.14*** 8.10***
Hotel_Stars =4.0 No
(0.09) (0.15)
8.45*** 9.40***
Hotel_Stars =5.0 No
(0.12) (0.44)
8.34*** 7.77***
Hotel_Stars = Not Rated No
(0.18) (0.43)
8.16***
Constant No No
(0.06)
Hotel Dummy No No Yes
R-Rquared 1.40% 96.23% 96.94%
Observations 1,488 1,488 1,488
*** < .01, ** < .05, and * < .10.

Table 4 provides the regression results for the second hypothesis tests. We
examine the impact of cultural differences between two nationalities on
heterogeneity in the reviews left by US and Korean customers for Korean hotels.
Each column in the table includes the same control variables as those in table 3. In
the second column, we incorporated dummy variables for star-ratings and included
the hotel dummy variables in the third column. The first column shows the impact
of nationality on the absolute distance. We observe that the absolute distance of
reviews left by US customers, on average, is lower than that of those by Korean
customers (βnationality= -0.23***). Confirming the research by Oishi et al. (2007)
positive and negative events tend to have a stronger impact on the Asian
perspective. Therefore, this leads Korean customers to evaluate their experiences
32 ACADEMY OF ASIAN BUSINESS REVIEW, JUNE 2016

with hotel services toward the extremes. This means that, by comparison, there is
less heterogeneity in the reviews left by US customers.

TABLE 4
Does Cultural Difference between Countries Lead to a Difference in Absolute Distance?

Dependent Variable Abs_distance Abs_distance Abs_distance

Nationality -0.23*** -0.23*** -0.23***
(US=1,Korea=0) (0.05) (0.05) (0.04)
1.43*** 1.32***
Hotel_Stars=1.0 No
(0.14) (0.47)
1.27*** 1.12***
Hotel_Stars =2.0 No
(0.07) (0.03)
1.31*** 0.80***
Hotel_Stars =3.0 No
(0.05) (0.23)
1.36*** 0.41***
Hotel_Stars =4.0 No
(0.05) (0.07)
1.32*** 1.05***
Hotel_Stars =5.0 No
(0.07) (0.28)
1.07*** 1.25***
Hotel_Stars = Not Rated No
(0.11) (0.22)
1.31***
Constant No No
(0.03)
Hotel Dummy No No Yes
R-Rquared 1.39% 60.46% 66.22%
Observations 1,488 1,488 1,488

*** < .01, ** < .05, and * < .10.

General Discussions
It is well-known that online reviews play a critical role in the sales of products
and services (Dellarocas, Zhang, and Awad 2007). Recently, many researchers
have found that online consumer review behavior can be influenced by cultural
differences across nations (Fang et al. 2013; Park and Lee 2009; Koh et al. 2010;
He et al. 2012). However, very few studies have explored cross-cultural influences
on review posting behavior in the non-experimental setting. The reason for this is
the concern for sample selection bias existing in a non-random sample, such as
online review data from travel sites. By employing a matching method called the
Mahalanobis Distance, in order to minimize the possibility of bias, we tried to
answer the question of whether cultural differences across countries have an impact
on review posting behavior in a non-experimental setting. Specifically, we used the
 Cultural Differences in Online Review Posting Behavior 33

review data from hotels in Seoul on Booking.com to compare the differences in

review posting behavior between US and Korean customers.
This study sheds light on the e-WOM process of different countries with varied
cultural backgrounds, and highlights the effects of cultural differences on review
posting behavior. We found that Korean consumers with a collectivistic orientation
are more likely to leave lower ratings, supporting our first hypothesis. Their
reviews tend to be more critical compared to the US travelers. In addition, we also
confirmed that the impact of positive and negative events is stronger for Korean
customers than US customers, resulting in a lower level of heterogeneity in the
reviews left by US customers. This corresponds with our second hypothesis.
Overall, these findings insist that cultural differences between the US and South
Korea have a significant impact on online review posting behavior, and provide
undeniable contributions for hotel management as well as to online marketing
communication literature. By providing a better understanding of the differences in
review posting behavior between different countries, it can ultimately lead to
increased success for hotels if they act accordingly with the preferences of
customers from different cultural backgrounds.
This study, however, has some limitations. First, we only used online review data
from hotels in Seoul. The findings of this research could be specific to Seoul,
which functions as a barrier for generalizing the findings to other empirical settings.
Therefore, it is necessary to conduct the same tests with different data from
different cities in different countries to confirm our findings. Second, the impact of
cultural differences among customers from different countries on online review
posting behavior can be quite varied depending on multiple factors, such as the
quality level of hotels. Even though the quality-level of hotels can moderate these
impacts on review posting, this study is limited in its ability to deal with the issue
due to data limitations. For further research, we would need to consider the factors
that can play a moderating role in determining the relationship between cultural
differences and review posting behavior.

(Received May 30, 2016; Revised June 21, 2016; Accepted June 22, 2016)
34 ACADEMY OF ASIAN BUSINESS REVIEW, JUNE 2016

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