The Review that Stopped You to Eat There and Think That.

Abstract: Abstract: In this thesis I compared online readers' perceptions of the online negative review in terms of credibility, quality, usefulness and likelihood of intention to buy a service in the restaurant context as response to online reviews, containing vague versus specific arguments and with a reviewer's photo versus without it. This study showed a difference in readers' perceptions in terms of credibility, quality and usefulness between groups of readers exposed to specific and vague posts while just two differences in perception of credibility and quality were uncovered for groups of people who had been exposed to the messages with a reviewer's photo and without it. Finally, no difference was found in changing of intention to make a restaurant reservation i.e. to buy a service for groups of individuals who had examined reviews with the author's photo and without it. As regards to individuals who had been exposed to the reviews with specific versus vague arguments in the content they were affected differently: those who read posts with specific arguments were more likely to change an intention to purchase a service than those who studied reviews with vague points.