As the result o f an extensive literature review, eight restaurant word-of-mouth
constructs and fourteen hypotheses were formulated. They were based on the theoretical
background o f communication models, on Bansal and Voyer’s word-of-mouth model, and
on the Theory o f Planned Behavior. The data were collected via a web-based survey. The
Structural Equation Modeling method was adopted to test hypotheses and eventually to
answer research questions. The findings o f this study suggest that factors o f word-ofmouth
sender’s expertise, reference group, and word-of-mouth search effort influence the
consumer’s restaurant service/product purchase decision. For example, if the Sender
seems experienced, and if the receiver cares about how others see him when he makes an
additional word-of-mouth search effort, then the influence of the sender’s word-of-mouth
on the receiver’s purchase decision increases. Similarly, the perceived word-of-mouth
receiver’s expertise, perceived risk, and self -restaurant image congruence constructs
turned out to be influential factors for the consumer’s word-of-mouth search effort. It
seems that the more educated (experienced) customers actively search word-of-mouth
information when they feel more risk about the restaurant choice and when they see more
o f image congruence between the restaurant and themselves.
It was interesting that most o f the experiences reported in this study involved
positive word-of-mouth. It seems that positive word-of-mouth has a bigger impact on a
restaurant consumer’s word-of-mouth experience. It is also noteworthy that the word-ofmouth
channel most respondents used was face-to-face.