The rise of digital media technology over the last few decades has transformed the way in which organizations are evaluated. Every day, on a plurality of platforms and websites, individuals disclose information about their interactions with organizations and their products or services (Dellarocas 2003, Kaplan and Haenlein 2010). Digital users are heterogeneous in terms of motivations and expertise. Compared to traditional media or professional critics, they tend to share subjective and partial experiences, have lower concerns for accuracy and balance, and often put emphasis on the emotional content (Etter et al. 2019). As more customers rely on the opinions of their peers for their purchasing choices (Rindova et al. 2005, Simonson and Rosen, 2014), the process of formation of organizational reputation has been profoundly transformed (Etter et al. 2019, George et al. 2016). In light of this change, organizations need to reassess their strategies to manage their reputation. While management scholars have started to explore the implications of this transformation in social evaluation processes (George et al. 2016, Orlikowski and Scott 2014), few studies have specifically focused on the tools available to organizations to manage their reputation in the new context (Chevalier et al. 2018, Halperin et al. 2018, Proserpio and Zervas 2017, Wang et al. 2016). In this study, we will focus on how organizations engage with customers in online platforms. In particular, drawing on research in the area of impression management, we ask whether common types of verbal accounts (i.e., apology and excuse) are effective tools to manage online threats to reputation posed by customer reviews, and what drives their adoption by organizations. To this end, we analyze a sample of over 294,000 reviews and 9,503 management responses published on the Yelp pages of restaurants in Los Angeles. Through the textual analysis of reviews and responses, we study the effectiveness of apologies and excuses in mitigating online threats to the reputation of restaurants. In addition, by means of a scenario-based online experiment administered to restaurant owners and managers, we investigate potential mechanisms driving the adoption of apologies and excuses to engage with customers. This study aims to provide two contributions to the existing literature. First, the focus on the actions employed by organizations to face online threats to reputation directly contributes to the emerging literature on reputation dynamics in the age of disintermediation (Etter et al. 2019). Second, the shift from the simple occurrence of a public response to the style of responses contributes to literature on ratings and rankings (Espeland and Sauder 2007, Orlikowski and Scott 2014, Wezel et al. 2016). Finding that specific response styles are more effective in mitigating threats to reputation suggests that the discussion on the benefits of public organizational responses would benefit from the integration of literature on impression and perception management (Conlon and Murray 1996, Elsbach 1994, 2003, Schlenker 1980, Tedeschi 2013)
