The Effect of Identity Disclosure on Reliability and Efforts Provision in Online Review Systems

As consumers rely on online customer reviews to assess the quality of products, firms often try to manipulate the reviews to attract consumers. If review sites fail to maintain reliability, firms are less likely to be motivated in improving quality of products. To alleviate fakery, online review providers have designed several identity disclosure mechanisms. The purpose of this research is to explore the role of identity disclosure on (1) reliability of online review systems and (2) subsequent efforts provision. We employ an incentive-aligned laboratory experiment based on a simple model of review systems. As theory of social pressure predicts, our results show that identity disclosure hurt the reliability of review systems, but not necessarily efforts provision. The current paper is a research in progress that aims to better understand the role of identity disclosure in online review systems.