Going into Overdrive? Structural Positions and Prosocial Behavior of Reviewers in Online Communities
25 Apr 2025 (Fri)
9:30am – 11:00am
LSK Rm5047
Prof. Olga M. Khessina, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

In today’s digital era, the increasing proliferation of online review communities is transforming the way businesses and consumers interact, with consumer reviews emerging as an influential source of information about products and their companies. As a result, reviews not only shape the decisions of customers and businesses but also influence broader culture. As companies seek to align with consumer values, such as sustainability and social responsibility, reviews offer organizations insights into the values and behaviors that resonate with their audiences. Traditionally, reviews are seen as sincere evaluations of products. However, this approach overlooks that reviewers are influenced by their position in the social structure of the online community network. In this study, we seek to examine how a reviewer’s centrality in the community’s network (i.e., the number of connections to other community members) shapes the expression of prosocial values in their reviews, defined as values benefiting society at large. We predict that more central reviewers will engage in prosocial reviewing more under social pressure but will be less committed as a result. The opposite should be true for highly central reviewers that do not succumb to pressures and if they choose prosocial reviewing, they will be more committed to it. We find support to our theorizing in longitudinal analyses of the population of all reviewers in the online tea community Steepster.com, from its start in 2009 through 2022. Ultimately, our study suggests that online review communities develop and maintain cultures through structural influences, and that organizations can understand and align with their customers’ values better by studying both communities’ cultures and network structures.