Online Appendix to “Promotional Reviews: An Empirical Investigation of Online Review Manipulation”
نویسندگان
چکیده
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 sample, only 1.2% of Orbitz reviews were unverified. Hence, while the Orbitz data is not a perfect substitute for Expedia data due to Orbitz’s hybrid model, its smaller size, and the fact that there may sharper differences between TripAdvisor and Orbitz reviewer preferences, we expect that Orbitz’s verified reviews are costlier to manipulate than TripAdvisor’s reviews. If our results are driven by important (and subtle) differences between the customer pools at Expedia and TripAdvisor, robustness of our results for Orbitz may be valuable.
منابع مشابه
Promotional Reviews: An Empirical Investigation of Online Review Manipulation
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 m...
متن کاملThe Tip of the Iceberg of Misleading Online Advertising; Comment on “Trouble Spots in Online Direct-to-Consumer Prescription Drug Promotion: A Content Analysis of FDA Warning Letters”
Kim’s overview of Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regulatory actions from 2005 to 2014 is a comprehensive analysis of the US regulatory experience with online direct-to-consumer advertising (DTCA) of prescription medicines. This experience is of relevance internationally as online DTCA reaches the English-speaking public globally, despite the illegality of DTCA in most countries. The most co...
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 کاملAn Assessment of Online Reviews of Hand Surgeons
Background: The purpose of this study is to evaluate the number of reviews and scores for active members of the American Society for Surgery of the Hand (ASSH) in popular physician rating websites (Healthgrades.com and Vitals.com). Methods: A total of 433 ASSH active members were searched in two popular rating websites for a total of 866 web searches. Demographic data, overall and subcategory ...
متن کامل