All Reviews are Not Created Equal :

Online product review networks play an important role in Internet commerce by transmitting information that customers can use to evaluate products in digital marketplace. These networks frequently include an explicit social component allowing consumers to view both how community members have rated individual product reviews and the social status of individual reviewers. We extend this prior work by analyzing how these social factors impact consumer responses to disaggregate review information. To do this, we use a new dataset that allows us to control for the degree to which other community members found the review helpful, and the reputation of the reviewer in the community. We find that reviews that the community finds helpful have a stronger impact on consumer purchase decisions than other reviews. Moreover, these reviews have a stronger impact on less popular books than more popular books, where consumers may more information about the product. We also find evidence consistent with the hypothesis that featured reviews have a stronger impact on consumer purchase decisions than other reviews do. Overall, our results suggest that the micro-level dynamics of community interactions are valuable in signaling quality — over-and-above the aggregate-level summary quality scores.