Impact of Anonymity on Consumers' Online Reviews

Extant literature has studied the relationship between identity disclosure and online consumer reviews, yet no research has investigated the effects of the introduction of an "anonymous review" option on consumers' online reviews. With a unique restaurant review data set from a most popular online review platform in China, we exploit a natural experiment setup in which the platform launched a new function of "anonymous review" that allows reviewers' choosing not to disclose their own information while posting reviews. We ground in the theories of deindividuation and social presence, and the notion of negativity bias to investigate the effects of anonymity on consumers' online review provision in terms of their rating behavior and emotional expressions in review texts. The results show that the anonymity function implementation induces a decrease in overall ratings and a decrease (increase) in positive (negative) emotions on average. Furthermore, using the reviews after the policy change, we find that, compared to non-anonymous reviews, anonymous ones are usually with lower ratings and more (less) negative (positive) emotions, which can further induce subsequent reviewers' negative reviews. Our findings underscore the doubled-sides of an "anonymous review" function the public policy makers, platform and restaurant managers need to balance in practice.