REWARDS THAT SPEAK: HOW INCENTIVIZED ONLINE REVIEWS SHAPE CUSTOMER LOYALTY AND REVIEW OUTCOMES

Abstract

In today’s competitive marketplace, online reviews have become a central feature of consumer decision-making and business strategy. Research consistently documents a positive relationship between review outcomes such as review volume and product sales, underscoring their critical role in shaping firm performance. However, the majority of consumers do not voluntarily write reviews, posing a challenge for companies that rely on user-generated content. To address this issue, companies often offer incentives to motivate customers to write reviews. Despite their widespread use, research on their impact remains limited. This dissertation comprises two essays that examine the impact of incentivized reviews from complementary perspectives. The first essay investigates how offering incentives for writing reviews influences customer loyalty through the psychological mechanism of gratitude. Across multiple experiments in product and service contexts, incentivized reviews elicit feelings of gratitude, which enhance long term customer loyalty. This essay challenges the view that incentives foster only transactional relationships, highlighting their potential to strengthen enduring customer– brand connections. The second essay is a systematic review that examines how incentives influence online reviews, focusing on review quantity, quality, and valence. Prior research presents mixed findings, making it unclear when incentives enhance review outcomes and when they may backfire, posing a key challenge for managers. These inconsistent findings arise largely because prior studies fail to distinguish four key sources of heterogeneity: actor (who is being studied), timing (when effects are measured), measurement differences (outcome operationalization), and disciplinary variation (theoretical and methodological differences). The systematic review synthesizes 32 empirical studies from 2012 to 2025 to explain these divergent results. Together, these two essays provide a comprehensive view of the strategic use of incentives, offering actionable insights for theory and managerial practice.