Dissecting Genuine and Deceptive Kudos: The Case of Online Hotel Reviews

As users continue to rely on online hotel reviews for making purchase decisions, the trend of posting deceptive reviews to heap praises and kudos is gradually becoming a wellestablished e-business malpractice. Conceivably, it is not trivial for users to distinguish between genuine and deceptive kudos in reviews. Hence, this paper identifies three linguistic cues that could offer telltale signs to distinguish between genuine and deceptive reviews. These linguistic cues include readability, genre and writing style. Drawing data from a publicly available secondary dataset, results indicate that readability and writing style of reviews offer useful clues to distinguish between genuine and deceptive reviews. Specifically, genuine reviews could be more readable and less hyperbolic compared with deceptive entries. With respect to review genre however, the differences were largely blurred. The implications of the findings for theory and practice are highlighted. Keywords—e-business; user-generated content; online reviews; opinion spam; readability; genre; writing style