Promotional Reviews: An Empirical Investigation of Online Review Manipulation
Dina Mayzlin, Yaniv Dover, Judith Chevalier
American Economic Review · 2014 · Volume 104 · Issue 8
Abstract
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.
Keywords
Information and Product Quality, Standardization and Compatibility, Sports, Gambling, Restaurants, Recreation, Tourism, Marketing
Enable JavaScript for citation tools and additional paper interactions.