Business & Management Research Centre: Zaiyan Wei
Zaiyan Wei
Mitch Daniels School of Business - Perdue University
Guiding without Generating: Artificial Intelligence (AI)-Enabled Topic Nudges in Online Reviews
Date: Friday, April 10, 2026
Time: 10:30 am - 12:00 pm EDT
Location: Armstrong building - Room 255
All are cordially invited to attend.
About:
Digital platforms increasingly face a common challenge: how to elicit richer and more useful user-generated content (UGC) without fully automating content production. We study this question in the context of online reviews by examining Yelp’s introduction of an artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled topic nudging tool in 2023. The feature provides real-time prompts to guide review writers in addressing key dimensions of the dining experience as they compose their reviews. Using more than 1.5 million reviews and a differences-in-differences design, we find that AI-enabled topic nudges significantly reshape the generation of reviews. First, they expand topical coverage, particularly for underrepresented aspects such as service and ambiance, and lead to longer reviews while reducing overall review volume. Second, reviews become more textually complex and less readable, and they receive fewer helpfulness votes on average. Further analysis shows that the decline in perceived helpfulness is mitigated when review content remains concentrated on a dominant dimension, highlighting the importance of informational focus. Lastly, we find that the impacts are heterogeneous: less experienced users expand review length and topical coverage more significantly, whereas experienced users exhibit greater complexity and larger declines in perceived helpfulness. Our findings extend research on AI and user-generated content by highlighting a distinct mode of AI deployment, i.e., guiding rather than generating human contributions, and by revealing its benefits and unintended consequences for platform design.
