Keeping the mall alive? Identifying drivers of shopping mall satisfaction and survival from customer reviews

Abstract

As digital commerce expands, shopping malls with similar observable characteristics experience sharply different trajectories, raising the question of why some sustain customer satisfaction and survive while others close. We develop an aspect-based sentiment analysis to extract sentence-level sentiment toward five perceived mall retail environment (PMRE) attributes, mall access, mall atmosphere, cross-store assortment, within-store assortment and price and promotion from more than 250,000 online customer reviews and examine their associations with mall satisfaction and mall survival across two large-scale studies in the United States and the United Kingdom. Review-level analyses show that sentiment toward mall-controlled PMRE attributes, especially cross-store assortment and mall atmosphere, is more strongly associated with mall satisfaction than sentiment toward tenant-controlled PMRE attributes. These associations vary systematically with mall size, population density, and population income. Mall-year survival models show that higher mall satisfaction is associated with higher chance of survival and that satisfaction statistically accounts for the association between PMRE attribute sentiment and survival. This pattern is consistent with satisfaction serving as the central evaluative conduit linking cumulative customer perceptions to long-term mall viability. Together, the findings clarify which controllable PMRE attributes relate most strongly to customer satisfaction, when these associations are strongest, and how aggregated customer evaluations correspond to mall survival.