Discussion of functional design options for online rating systems: A state-of-the-art analysis

Ratings are important for building up trust among different parties. Since the arrival of the internet era in the 1990s, countless online rating systems have emerged. For example, Amazon.com established a rating system for books and other products in 1995. Today online rating can be found everywhere, be it e-commerce sites, social networks, and information or recommendation platforms. In most cases, users provide the input to these systems which is then aggregated and directed to appropriate recipients. The increasing relevance of these rating systems forms a new distinct research field with a growing need for research on the design, effects, and validity of rating systems. Hence, we contribute to the body of knowledge by conducting a thorough analysis of the state of the art of online rating systems. We especially focus on the functional design options by analyzing 102 different systems with the help of a criteria catalog of 237 criteria. In this paper, we discuss an excerpt of our findings and present a morphological box that categorizes functional design options for online rating systems.