Service robots in online reviews: Online robotic discourse

Previous research has suggested that customers' discourse in online reviews (ORs) is critical upon and immediately after new product introductions to build consumers' awareness (Godes & Mayzlin, 2004) and can be leveraged to track the popularity of a product or service feature over time (Chevalier & Mayzlin, 2006). Therefore, we argue that online consumers' discourse can be a useful means to assess whether the awareness about service robots goes beyond a mere “novelty effect” (Roehrich, 2004). Indeed, if the novelty effect associated with service robots is the only mechanism in place, robots' popularity would rapidly fade away, suggesting that robots are not a distinctive factor in the evaluation of the service offering. As service robots have been introduced in hospitality services quite recently, there is an urgent need to explore how and if customers' discourse revolving around them is evolving over time from both a diffusion and adoption of innovation (Rogers, 2003) and a human-robot interaction theoretical perspectives (Newell & Card, 1985; Tussyadiah, 2020). To bridge this research gap, this study aims to provide preliminary insights on the following research question: Are service robots becoming an increasingly distinctive and popular feature in hotel-related eWOM beyond their introduction? To this end, we develop the