BACKGROUND Little is known about the usefulness of online ratings when searching for a hospital. We therefore assess the association between quantitative and qualitative online ratings for US hospitals and clinical quality of care measures. METHODS First, we collected a stratified random sample of 1000 quantitative and qualitative online ratings for hospitals from the website RateMDs. We used...

Many online reviews have a helpfulness rating, and such ratings are being widely used by online shoppers for shopping research. Researchers also use them as a review quality benchmark. However, there is scant research about the reliability of such ratings. This paper explores the reliability of helpfulness ratings and their resistance to manipulations. We found that the existing helpfulness rat...

Ratings are critical to the function and success of services in the emerging sharing economy. They are a means through which users develop trust in one another and in the services themselves. Ratings are designed to give users a proxy for the expected quality and risk of potential online transactions. We expect online ratings to reflect an objective measure of quality, but such evaluations in f...

Instant quality feedback in the form of online peer ratings is a prominent feature of modern massive online social networks (MOSNs). It allows network members to indicate their appreciation of a post, comment, photograph, etc. Some MOSNs support both positive and negative (signed) ratings. In this study, we rated 11 thousand MOSN member profiles and collected user responses to the ratings. MOSN...

The importance of online ratings on sales is widely acknowledged. Firms need to find ways of increasing the number of ratings and rating scores, but how they can achieve this effectively is less well established. In this paper we analyze the impact of an unconditional gift on customers’ rating behavior in an online field experiment. Contrary to prevalent advice, our results suggest that providi...

Scholars generally assume that consumer ratings reflect satisfaction, but can be influenced by the design of rating system. We examine two designs—single-dimensional systems, which elicit overall only, and multidimensional (MD) both dimensional ratings—and how they impact ratings. Drawing on accessibility–diagnosticity framework, we argue in MD systems influence based dimensions have been rated...