Hengyun Li

• Doctor of Philosophy
• University of South Carolina

Purpose This study aims to investigate the influence of the reviewed establishment’s price level and the user’s social network size and reputation status on consumers’ tendency to post more visual imagery content. Furthermore, it explores the moderating effects of user experiences and geographic distance on these dynamics. Design/methodology/appro...

The online P2P accommodation market, including Airbnb, encourages accommodation hosts to upload profile photos. However, the inclusion of a profile photo may carry consequences such as appearance discrimination. Using secondary Airbnb data from Beijing, China, this study investigates the presence of the “beauty premium” in the relatively low-priced...

Visual content has become an integral component of customers’ experience sharing, with customers increasingly searching for visual content in online reviews prior to making purchases. This study examines the effects of customer-generated images in online reviews on subsequent customer engagement using a multimethod design combining computer vision...

It is important to understand business online review manipulations, through which consumers can make better choice and platforms' reputations can be maintained. Based on monthly panel data of 970 restaurants across 14 years in a metropolitan city in the US, this study investigates the impact of competition on both restaurant positive and negative o...

The presence of hosts' profile photo on peer-to-peer accommodation platforms is likely to influence consumers' judgments and purchase behavior. Based on the stimulus-organism-response theory and mental imagery theory, this study examines the existence and mechanisms of beauty premium via experimental designs. Results indicate that consumers tend to...

As restaurants increasingly solicit fake reviews on online word-of-mouth (WOM) platforms, the authenticity and credibility of online reviews have been compromised. This study investigates restaurants’ motivations to solicit positive fake reviews from a competition perspective. Our results show that a higher number of positive fake reviews by compet...

This study aims to forecast international tourist arrivals to Hong Kong from seven English-speaking countries. A new direction in tourism demand modeling and forecasting is presented by incorporating tourist-generated online review data related to tourist attractions, hotels, and shopping markets into the destination forecasting system. The main em...

Anthropomorphizing chatbots can facilitate effective customer interaction. Based on a mixed method, this study explores perceived chatbot anthropomorphism cues and their effects on customers’ chatbot usage intentions (UIs)in the online travel agency context. Findings suggest that (1) social presence cues and emotional message cues are major anthrop...

Although many firms deem weather conditions relevant to customers’ decision making and satisfaction, firms often struggle to quantify the impact of weather on customers’ online evaluation behavior. By combining hourly weather data and online review data from an online booking platform, this study found distinct review-related effects of rainy weath...

The research aims to examine how positive review disconfirmation (i.e., a positive deviance between a hotel consumer’s poststay evaluation and the average review rating by prior consumers) affects subsequent consumers’ willingness to post online reviews and their own review ratings. By employing an experimental research method, this study reveals t...

Purpose While relevant research has considered aggregated data from mobile devices and personal computers (PCs), tourists’ search patterns on mobile devices and PCs differ significantly. This study aims to explore whether decomposing aggregated search queries based on the terminals from which these queries are generated can enhance tourism demand f...

During a pandemic, tourism can inflict negative social costs on communities in tourist destinations. This study examines factors affecting residents’ responses to policies to mitigate the social costs of tourism during a pandemic. Two hypothetical scenarios are analyzed. Study 1 investigates framing effects on residents’ attitudes toward the effect...

Social media has changed travelers’ behavior in many aspects, including tourism experience sharing. This study examines the influence of tourism experience sharing on travelers’ posttrip evaluations, by considering three facets of experience sharing on social media: expressive writing, sharing on social media, and audience response on social media....

Online reviews play an important role in motivating hotels to enhance customer engagement through appropriate management responses. However, the impact of management responses on customer engagement remains unclear. With data from hotel reviews and management responses, this study demonstrates that customer engagement is significantly reduced when...

The objective of this study is to investigate how review temporal distance influences the conformity of consumer restaurant review ratings. By employing an innovative dataset pairing consumer reservation records and consumer online reviews, the findings of this study indicate that (1) in general, temporal distance has a positive influence on restau...

Purpose With the growing online review manipulation and fake reviews in the hospitality industry, it is not uncommon that a consumer encounters disconfirmation when comparing the existing online reviews with his/her own product or service evaluation. The purpose of this study is to investigate the influence of review disconfirmation on customer onl...

Consumer-generated restaurant reviews are important sources in consumers’ purchase decisions. The purpose of this study is to explore the impact of emotional intensity on perceived review usefulness as well as the moderating effects of review length and reviewer expertise. Data from 600,686 reviews of 300 popular restaurants in the US were obtained...

Prior studies have shown that Internet search query data have great potential to improve tourism forecasting. As such, selecting the most relevant information from large amounts of search query data is crucial to enhancing forecasting accuracy and reducing overfitting; however, such feature selection methods have not been considered in the tourism...

Based on internet big data from multiple sources (i.e., the Baidu search engine and two online review platforms, Ctrip and Qunar), this study forecasts tourist arrivals to Mount Siguniang, China. Key findings of this empirical study indicate that (a) tourism demand forecasting based on internet big data from a search engine and online review platfo...

The purpose of this study is to explore factors contributing to users' reviewing effort in the online review platform and understand the mechanism behind the effect. Based on a mixed method including secondary data analysis and experimental data analysis, the results indicate the following. (1) A user receiving more managerial responses tends to ex...

Purpose Online reviews are often likely to be socially influenced by prior reviews. This study aims to examine key review and reviewer characteristics which may influence the social influence process. Design/methodology/approach Restaurant review data from Yelp.com are analyzed using an ordered logit model and text mining approach. Findings This...

This study investigated the effects of consumer experience and disconfirmation on the timing of online reviews. Based on a unique dataset of restaurant reservations and online reviews, the empirical results indicate that (1) there is a reverse U-shaped relationship between consumer experience and online review posting timing, i.e., consumers who ha...

Purpose This paper aims to examine the influences of the number of hotel management responses and especially the textual similarity in hotel management responses to online reviews on hotel online booking. Design/methodology/approach This study used the data from 437 hotels in New York City on Expedia. The data specifically include online reviews...

This study is among the first attempts to understand hotel location choice by developing a local spatial model to investigate spatial determinants of hotel locations in an urban tourism destination, taking Hong Kong as the study context. The spatially diverse relationships between nine factors (i.e., land area, green land, traffic land, residential...

The terrorist attacks of 9/11 and the financial crisis of 2008 had a considerable impact on the hospitality industry around the World. Using monthly STR hotel data for Honduras and Costa Rica, this study investigates if differences exist among these two countries and their impacts on the hotel industry. The results indicate that the two crises are...

Purpose This study aims to investigate how prior reviews posted by other consumers affect subsequent consumers’ evaluations and to what extent the review temporal distance can increase or reduce the social influence of prior reviews. In this study’s restaurant context, review temporal distance refers to the duration between dining time and review t...

Studies have examined tourism shopping in various aspects, but scarce research has specifically focused on impulsive shopping behavior of tourists, which is of particular relevance in the tourism settings. This study addresses this paucity by examining factors influencing impulsive tourist shopping urge and purchase from the aspects of tourist inte...

Consumers always face a tradeoff between making a purchase decision now and continuing information searching with delayed purchase decision. This study extends extant literature by empirically investigating the effects of online peer reviews on consumers’ timing of booking a restaurant using a merged data set of online peer reviews and consumer res...

The purpose of this study is to explore the impacts of temporal, explanatory, and sensory cues on customers’ perceived usefulness and enjoyment toward restaurant online reviews. Text mining approach and econometric analysis are used to examine 186,714 online reviews of 300 restaurants collected from Yelp.com. Empirical results show that temporal cu...

This study investigates a rarely studied topic on gender difference in restaurant online booking timing, and the impact of sell-out risk and online review rating and review text on restaurant booking among males and females. The data were collected from Xiaomishu.com, a leading restaurant reservation website in China. A total of 719,812 reservation...

Purpose This paper aims to examine the effects of perceived authenticity at an independent, full-service mainstream ethnic restaurant and the moderating effects of diners’ cultural familiarity and cultural motivation on the influence of perceived authenticity on perceived value and behavioral intention. Design/methodology/approach A total of 417 s...

In order to encourage users’ engagement as well as crowdsource quality control, a majority of online review websites have started to provide review peer evaluation votes, reviewer credentialing program and social network service. By considering the review text features as well as reviewer’s social identity and social network, this study examined th...

Destinations formulate their tourism development strategies based on a number of factors, including tourism spillover effects. Using data from 98 administrative cities in Eastern China from 2004 to 2012 and spatial modelling techniques, this study examines the spillover effect of attractions, including natural, cultural and man-made attractions. Th...

The objective is to investigate the role government plays in tourism competitiveness and understand the relationship based on the Tourism Area Life Cycle model. We argue that tourism competitiveness is influenced not only by the governments' decisions but also by the stage of tourism development of the country. Countries characterized as tourism-de...

This study proposes a relative climate index based on the push and pull theory to assess the effects of relative climate variability on seasonal tourism demand. The relative climate index measures the climatic comfort of a destination relative to that of the tourist origin. Using the proposed approach, the effects of the relative climate comfort on...

The economic impacts of on-screen tourism are particularly interesting, and research in this area can provide useful information to governments making decisions regarding subsidising film production and forming relevant marketing strategies. No reliable and systematic approach for measuring the economic impacts of on-screen tourism currently exists...

This study investigates the functions of international tourism hubs, namely, the gathering and distributing function, transferring function, and management and service function. An assessment index of 49 indicators is developed measuring these functions based on the literature review and a survey of expert panel. Analytical hierarchy process method...

This study examines the role of tourism development in reducing regional income inequality in China. First, the theoretical foundation for how tourism affects regional income inequality is discussed. Second, based on the conditional convergence framework, this study proposes a spatiotemporal autoregressive model to capture spatial and temporal depe...

An assessment index of international tourism hubs is developed based on a comprensive literature review. The index includes 49 indicators covering three primary functions: gathering and distributing; transferring; and management and service. The study surveyed a panel of 15 tourism experts and applied the analytical hierarchy process to determine t...

This study analyzes the factors that discourage non-tourists' participation in domestic tourism. Data were collected in 15 cities in China and analyzed using a comparative analysis and non-parametric ridit analysis. The findings indicate that (i) non-tourists have low internal travel motivation and attitude and are more likely to be under 25 or abo...

A new model that links climate and seasonal tourism demand is developed to study the effects of home climate, destination climate, and climate difference between destinations and source markets on seasonal tourism demand. Using the dynamic panel data technique, the study focuses on the demand of tourists from Hong Kong for 19 of the major tourism c...

Non-tourists comprise a large potential market, but are rarely studied in research. This paper aims to examine the reasons behind the non-participation of individuals in domestic tourism through a proposed combined framework which incorporates concepts presented in the psychological continuum model and constraint negotiation model from the field of...

The Internet is becoming an important source of health information; however, unverified health rumours may be included in health-related search results. There is a critical need to provide health information seekers with methods that are specifically geared towards the identification of the authenticity of health rumours. Using 453 health rumours c...

This study focuses on demonstrating the differences and similarities between and among Western and Asian customers in terms of travelers’ evaluation of satisfaction, perceived value, and attribute quality in a Hong Kong hotel setting. It has been noted that national culture has a substantial impact on travelers’ expectations and perceptions. The re...

Many developing countries are now suffering from rather large regional development gaps. Can tourism promote balanced regional development (BRD) and so narrow such gaps? This study empirically examines and compares the impact of both international and domestic tourism on China's regional development using the Gini coefficient method and the Granger...

Determining the priority of infrastructure assets is an important problem in critical infrastructure protection. However, relatively few studies have attempted to address the problem. This paper presents a quantitative approach for determining the elements of a railway infrastructure that have the highest protection priority. The train stations in...

This article aims to examine whether tourism can promote or hinder balanced regional development (BRD) in China. Unlike previous studies that mostly employ simple descriptive analysis, this study empirically analyzes the effects of tourism on BRD, especially on regional economic disparity within and between inland and coastal areas, by using the co...

Despite the relatively high economic growth in tourism-specialised destinations, the long-term sustainability of such growth has rarely been studied. This paper investigates sustainable growth using Sanya and Zhangjiajie as two special cases and applies an accounting growth model to measure the contributions of different input factors and of the to...

As one of the most important economic sectors in China, tourism must be supported in a way that will encourage balanced regional economic development. The spatial distribution of tourism should be evaluated to assess the role of growing tourism in regional economic inequality. Unlike previous studies that focus on international tourism, this paper...