SOCIAL INFLUENCE OR NORMATIVE CONFLICT? AN EXPERIMENTAL STUDY OF ONLINE CONSUMER REVIEWS AND CITIZEN EVALUATIONS OF AN AGENCY’S SERVICE

Online consumer reviews (OCRs) are commonly used by citizens to rate and/or describe their interactions with service providers in the public sector. However, we know little, if anything, about whether these evaluations impact how citizens rate the services they receive. This article closes this gap by conducting a preregistered online experimental survey and answering two sets of questions. First, do citizens break from an OCR community when their service experience does not align with an agency’s OCR (i.e., fail to conform to the OCR), or do they conform in these cases and rate the agency similarly to the OCR? Results from 770 survey participants suggest individuals show some conformity to OCRs, thus supporting social influence theory. Next, are citizens more likely to “warn” individuals about a public organization after receiving a poor service from the agency when the OCR is good, or do they “recommend” the public organization after receiving a good service from the agency when the OCR is poor? The results indicate that individuals are more inclined to recommend than to warn. However, this only occurred when respondents indicated what star rating they would give the agency in an OCR, not when reporting satisfaction with the service.