Promotional Reviews: An Empirical Investigation of Online Review Manipulation
نویسندگان
چکیده
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 multi-unit owners. We demonstrate that the hotel neighbors of hotels with a high incentive to fake have more negative reviews on TripAdvisor relative to Expedia; hotels with a high incentive to fake have more positive reviews on TripAdvisor relative to Expedia.
منابع مشابه
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...
متن کاملOn the Internet
Chat rooms, recommendation sites, and customer review sections provide consumers with an opportunity to overcome geographic boundaries and to communicate based on mutual interests. However, marketers have incentives to anonymously supply promotional chat or reviews in order to influence the consumer's evaluation of their products. This, in turn, lowers the credibility of word of mouth transmitt...
متن کاملThe influence of user-generated content on traveler behavior: An empirical investigation on the effects of e-word-of-mouth to hotel online bookings
The increasing use of web 2.0 applications has generated numerous online user reviews. Prior studies have revealed the influence of user-generated reviews on the sales of products such as CDs, books, and movies. However, the influence of online user-generated reviews in the tourism industry is still largely unknown both to tourism researchers and practitioners. To bridge this knowledge gap in t...
متن کاملPromotional Chat on the Internet
C rooms, recommendation sites, and customer review sections allow consumers to overcome geographic boundaries and to communicate based on mutual interests. However, marketers also have incentives to supply promotional chat or reviews in order to influence the consumers’ evaluation of their products. Moreover, firms can disguise their promotion as consumer recommendations due to the anonymity af...
متن کاملDo online reviews matter? - An empirical investigation of panel data
Article history: Received 13 May 2007 Received in revised form 26 March 2008 Accepted 2 April 2008 Available online 10 April 2008 This study examines the persuasive effect and awareness effect of online user reviews on movies' daily box office performance. In contrast to earlier studies that take online user reviews as an exogenous factor, we consider reviews both influencing and influenced by ...
متن کامل