SI seminar with Giada di Stefano

As the number of industries not affected by online feedback continues to shrink, and the volume of online reviews generated each day continues to grow, organizations find themselves in a position where it is hard to ignore the opinions customers express online as inconsequential. Human attention is, however, a finite resource: decision makers cannot consider all feedback they receive, but rather automatically or intentionally focus their attention on selective stimuli. In this paper, we try and understand what drives attentional selection in the context of online customer feedback. To this end, we embark on a study of the restaurant industry. We build on extant theory to develop a set of hypotheses on the drivers and mechanisms behind attentional selection. We use insights from a set of exploratory interviews with chefs in France, Italy, and the United States to ground our hypotheses in the empirical context under examination. We test the resulting framework by means of a scenario-based experiment involving around 200 restaurants in France. Our findings reveal that, in general, decision makers allocate attention to feedback based on the extent to which its features suggest it will be highly consequential for the organization. However, we also find evidence of a “disturbance” effect of the emotions evoked by certain feedback features. In particular, when feedback triggers an overwhelming feeling of anger in the decision maker, we witness the choice to disregard feedback regardless of its consequences for the organization.

The seminar takes place in Kilen, room 2.53.