What We Know and Don’t Know about Manager Responses: A Review and Synthesis of the Literature

In the past few years, a large number of scholars have paid attention to manager responses. Although the existing research has helped us to have a good understanding of some problems related to manager responses, there are still some academical and management problems. Moreover, no attempt has been made to consolidate and synthesize research in this area. As consumers increasingly rely on online retail, hotel reservation and information search, and the continuous growth of social media, the importance of manager response cannot be overemphasized. Based on a systematic review of several studies, we have made a comprehensive analysis of the manager responses in multiple dimensions, and raised the current and ongoing research key issues. Companies respond to different types of reviews (for different types of reviews, different platforms and different response strategies), which may have different effects (three aspects of platforms, hotels and consumers), which can be explained by attribution theory, social learning theory and others. The future research should further explore whether there are other key influencing factors in the review response, and try to analyze the reasons why different factors have different influence from a new theoretical perspective.