The moderating effect of restaurant type on hedonic versus utilitarian review evaluations

Online reviews from consumers are critically important to the restaurant business. This study identified a heuristic processing of content richness and source credibility and applied both for utilitarian and hedonic evaluations. Furthermore, we analyzed the moderating effect of restaurant type (casual, luxury fine dining restaurant). A total of 2629 online reviews were used, with 1323 reviews for three casual restaurants and 1306 reviews for three luxury restaurants. To collect the data, web harvesting and web content mining were conducted to extract useful information by employing an R program. which automatically extract online data. The results reveal that the effect of content richness and source credibility on utilitarian evaluations are greater for a casual restaurant than for a luxury restaurant, whereas only the number of content-rich images had a higher effect on hedonic evaluations of a casual restaurant. The implications of the findings can contribute to the development of marketing strategies.