Online user reviews describing various products and services are now abundant on the web. While the information conveyed through review texts and ratings is easily comprehensible, there is a wealth of hidden information in them that is not immediately obvious. In this study, we unlock this hidden value behind user reviews to understand the various dimensions along which users rate products. We ...

Objectives of the Study The aim of the research is to define and assess the importance of the factors that influence online shoppers’ choices of merchants. The previous literature mainly focuses on loyalty of users to websites and online purchase decision-making process within one website. No literature studies the situation under which the customer has already decided the item to purchase and ...

For online marketplaces to succeed and prevent a market of ‘lemons’, their feedback technologies must be able to differentiate among sellers and generate price premiums for trustworthy ones (as returns to their superior feedback). However, the literature has solely focused on positive and negative feedback ratings, alas ignoring the role of feedback text comments. These text comments are propos...

Despite of success in both research and industry, traditional collaborative filtering (CF) based recommender systems suffer from a fundamental problem, which lies in its dependence on users’ numeric ratings as its sole source of user preference information. User ratings are often unable to fully represent user preferences. As a result, it is difficult and error prone to identify genuinely simil...

Until now, the prevalence of extreme-valued ratings in online user-generating rating systems remained a puzzle. In this paper we show that if ratings are aggregated using the mean of sent-ratings, then with some constraints on equilibrium strategies, in all environments, the prevalence of extreme-valued ratings is driven by participation. That is, it is always the case that the more extremely a...

As online social networks expand their role beyond maintaining existing relationships, they may look to more faceted ratings to support the formation of new connections between their users. Our study focuses on one community employing faceted ratings, CouchSurfing.org, and combines data analysis of ratings, a large-scale survey, and in-depth interviews. In order to understand the ratings, we re...