Understanding and Overcoming Biases in Customer Reviews

TL;DR

This paper investigates biases in online customer reviews, revealing social influence effects and proposing methods to enhance review credibility and representativeness across major online retailers.

Contribution

It provides empirical evidence on social influence and selection biases in online reviews and suggests strategies to mitigate these biases for more credible ratings.

Findings

Email prompts lead to higher, more stable ratings.

Web reviews show a downward trend over time.

Email prompting does not affect existing reviewer behavior.

Abstract

Our paper contributes to the literature recommending approaches to make online reviews more credible and representative. We analyze data from four diverse major online retailers and find that verified customers who are prompted (by an email) to write a review, submit, on average, up to 0.5 star higher ratings than self-motivated web reviewers. Moreover, these email-prompted reviews remain stable over time, whereas web reviews exhibit a downward trend. This finding provides support for the existence of social influence and selection biases during the submission of a web review, when social signals are being displayed. In contrast, no information about the current state of the reviews is displayed in the email promptings. Moreover, we find that when a retailer decides to start sending email promptings, the existing population of web reviewers is unaffected both in their volume as well as the characteristics of their submitted reviews. We explore how our combined findings can suggest ways to mitigate various biases that govern online review submissions and help practitioners provide more credible, representative and higher ratings to their customers.