This paper empirically investigates how review moderation transparency affects the volume, length, and negativity of reviews. A change to the Yelp platform in 2010, introducing review moderation and displaying filtered reviews, created a natural experiment. We used a panel dataset of online reviews from the same set of restaurants on both the Yelp and TripAdvisor platforms in a difference-in-differences (DID) model to test how review moderation transparency affected our outcome variables. We found that increasing review moderation transparency negatively affects review volume but positively affects review negativity. The results also indicate that providing review moderation transparency reduces review length, especially for reviews with positive sentiment. Our findings suggest that providing review moderation transparency induces users to invest less effort in review contributions, especially when they are submitting positive reviews. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications of these results as they relate to the design and use of online review platforms.

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评论审核透明度和在线评论：来自自然实验的证据

本文实证研究了评论审核透明度如何影响评论的数量、长度和负面性。2010 年，Yelp 平台进行了一项更改，引入了评论审核并显示过滤后的评论，这创造了一个自然的实验。我们使用了 Yelp 和 TripAdvisor 平台上同一组餐厅的在线评论面板数据集，采用双重差分 (DID) 模型来测试评论审核透明度如何影响我们的结果变量。我们发现，提高评论审核透明度会对评论量产生负面影响，但会对评论负面影响产生积极影响。结果还表明，提供审核审核透明度可以缩短审核长度，尤其是对于具有积极情绪的审核。我们的研究结果表明，提供评论审核透明度会导致用户在评论贡献上投入更少的精力，尤其是当他们提交积极评论时。我们讨论这些结果与在线评论平台的设计和使用相关的理论和实践意义。