Mining and summarizing customer reviews
Proceedings of the tenth ACM SIGKDD international conference on Knowledge discovery and data mining
Communications of the ACM
WINE '08 Proceedings of the 4th International Workshop on Internet and Network Economics
How opinions are received by online communities: a case study on amazon.com helpfulness votes
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Motivations to participate in online communities
Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Exploring and mitigating social loafing in online communities
Computers in Human Behavior
IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering
Spotting fake reviewer groups in consumer reviews
Proceedings of the 21st international conference on World Wide Web
The groupon effect on yelp ratings: a root cause analysis
Proceedings of the 13th ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce
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Online recommendation sites are valuable information sources that people contribute to, and often use to choose restaurants. However, little is known about the dynamics behind participation in these online communities and how the recommendations in these communities are formed. In this work, we take a first look at online restaurant recommendation communities to study what endogenous (i.e., related to entities being reviewed) and exogenous factors influence people's participation in the communities, and to what extent. We analyze an online community corpus of 840K restaurants and their 1.1M associated reviews from 2002 to 2011, spread across every U.S. state. We construct models for number of reviews and ratings by community members, based on several dimensions of endogenous and exogenous factors. We find that while endogenous factors such as restaurant attributes (e.g., meal, price, service) affect recommendations, surprisingly, exogenous factors such as demographics (e.g., neighborhood diversity, education) and weather (e.g., temperature, rain, snow, season) also exert a significant effect on reviews. We find that many of the effects in online communities can be explained using offline theories from experimental psychology. Our study is the first to look at exogenous factors and how it related to online online restaurant reviews. It has implications for designing online recommendation sites, and in general, social media and online communities.