What Factors Influence Online Product Sales? Online Reviews, Review System Curation, Online Promotional Marketing and Seller Guarantees Analysis

Marketing Implications of Online Consumer Product Reviews

How Do Monetary Incentives Affect Online Product Reviews and Sales?

Online retailers employ various strategies, such as reviewer reputation systems and online communities, to encourage consumers to write online product reviews. Monetary incentives---a widely used extrinsic motivation in the business world---are not commonly used by online retailers to encourage consumers to write online product reviews. One plausible explanation is because of the cost of moneta...

Promotional Reviews: An Empirical Investigation of Online Review Manipulation

Firms’ incentives to manufacture biased user reviews impede review usefulness. We examine the differences in reviews for a given hotel between two sites: Expedia.com (only a customer can post a review) and TripAdvisor.com (anyone can post). We argue that the net gains from promotional reviewing are highest for independent hotels with single-unit owners and lowest for branded chain hotels with m...

Essays on Online Reviews: the Relationships between Reviewers, Reviews, and Product Sales, and the Temporal Patterns of Online Reviews

Interpersonal conversation, or word-of-mouth (WOM), is one of the important factors in affecting product sales (e.g. Herr et al. 1991, Laczniak et al. 2001). Potential buyers can gather information on the quality of the product through other consumers' WOM. WOM can not only increase product awareness among potential buyers but can also affect their buying decisions. With the development of onli...

Online Appendix to “Promotional Reviews: An Empirical Investigation of Online Review Manipulation”

Until late 2010, Orbitz, like Expedia, only accepted reviews from individuals who had booked their stay at Orbitz.com. Starting in late 2010, Orbitz allowed others to submit hotel reviews, but reviews from verified customers are identified as “Verified” and are given higher weight in calculating the Orbitz Reviewer Score for each property. Here we use only verified reviews from Orbitz. In our s...