An Empirical Study on the Differences between Online Picture Reviews and Text Reviews

In the context of e-commerce, online travel agencies often derive useful information from online reviews to improve transactions. Based on the dispute on the usefulness of different types of reviews and social exchange theory, this study investigates how the characteristics of pictures and text influence review reading and review posting behaviors and thus influencing the efficiency of online review systems. By analyzing crawled data of online hotels and conducting experiments, we first find that picture reviews are more useful than text reviews, and high-quality pictures in reviews have a significant impact on review usefulness. Second, posting pictures requires review posters to pay more perceived costs. Third, negative review posters have higher perceived costs, so they are more unwilling to post pictures, especially high-quality pictures. Our results indicate that review platforms need to add incentives to encourage consumers to post high-quality picture reviews and design workable interfaces to reduce the burden of negative reviewers to speed up the purchase decision process for review readers. This study provides theoretical implications by demonstrating how the adoption of the picture in review systems influences both review readers' and review posters' behaviors. Additionally, our findings also provide useful managerial insights for online travel suppliers in terms of building an effective review system to promote sales.