Vocal Minority and Silent Majority: How Do Online Ratings Reflect Population Perceptions of Quality?

Recently, the Internet has fostered a rapid rise in consumer-generated ratings. However, limited research has examined how these ratings reflect the opinions of the population at large, notably in the domain of professional services, where quality is often opaque to consumers. Building on the word-of-mouth research literature, we examine the relationship between online ratings and the offline population’s perception of physician quality. A distinctive feature that differentiates this study from prior work is a unique dataset that includes direct measures of both the offline population’s perception of physician quality, and consumer generated online reviews. These data allow us to examine how closely the online ratings reflect patients’ opinion about physician quality at large. We find, in sharp contrast to the widely voiced concerns by medical practitioners, that physicians who are rated lower in quality by the patient population are less likely to be rated online. Additionally, although ratings provided online are correlated with patient population opinions, the online ratings tend to be exaggerated at the ends of the quality spectrum. This study is one of the first to provide empirical evidence of the relationship between online ratings and the underlying consumer perceived quality. It also extends prior research on online word-of-mouth to the domain of professional services.