Determinants of Business Resilience in the Restaurant Industry During the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Textual Analytics Study on an O2O Platform Case
本文利用大众点评在线评论数据，通过文本分析测量消费趋势和销售冲击，构建并实证检验了疫情下餐饮业商业韧性的理论模型，发现社会资本、物质资本、经济资本和自然资本是韧性的关键决定因素。
Understanding the resilience capabilities of restaurant operations and the determinants affecting these capabilities is critical to helping restaurants overcome the hardships owing to the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic. This article adopts a textual analytics approach to scientifically measure consumption trends and identify the shock to restaurant sales using online customer review data from Dianping.com (an O2O platform in China). Moreover, the article proposes a theoretical model of business resilience for the restaurant industry in the context of the pandemic. Then, an empirical investigation on how the determinants in our theoretical framework affect the resilience of restaurant business operations using the panel logit model is conducted. Our findings indicate that the pandemic has severely disrupted the full-service restaurants as compared to the quick-service restaurants. We identify four determinants of resilience, namely social capital (i.e., restaurant rating), physical capital (i.e., contactless service), economic capital (i.e., chain operation), and natural capital (e.g., location), which are significantly associated with the resilience of restaurant business during the pandemic. These four determinants play different roles in the resilience of full-service and quick-service restaurants. The findings of this study have theoretical contribution and generate some important managerial implications for helping the restaurant industry recover from disruptions brought by the COVID-19 pandemic.