Replication Data to "Culture and Social Influence: Evidence From Online Reviews"

Research based on surveys and lab experiments indicates that people in more individualistic cultures are less likely to conform to the opinions of others. However, it remains unclear how well these findings generalize to real-world settings. This paper examines how culture shapes social influence in the context of online consumer reviews. By leveraging discontinuities in Tripadvisor’s display of average ratings, I estimate how reviewers from different countries respond to the average opinion of prior consumers. When a restaurant’s average rating increases by 0.5 stars, reviewers from less individualistic cultures give ratings that are 0.1 stars higher. This conformity effect diminishes with individualism and disappears entirely for reviewers from the most individualistic cultures. Importantly, this pattern is not explained by other country-level characteristics correlated with individualism, such as income or religious affiliation. Furthermore, cross-regional variation within Italy indicates that cultural values also predict differences in conformity among reviewers within the same country. These findings highlight that cultural values affect user behavior on online review platforms and may ultimately impact the accuracy of the information aggregated by these systems.