The significance of online consumer reviews has been increasingly acknowledged by both practitioners and researchers. These reviews are commonly used by consumers as a proxy for product quality in making purchase decisions. An implicit assumption behind their use is that the review ratings reflect consumers’ private evaluations of product quality. In this paper, we question this underlying assu...

This paper reports on a study whose purpose was to compare student ratings of instruction in online and face-to-face (F2F) higher education courses in an effort to better understand how faculty can strengthen their teaching in the online environment. Student ratings of instruction in online and on-campus courses were examined in two different ways that yielded similar findings. First, more than...

Abstract Listener-based ratings have become a prominent means of defining second language (L2) users’ global speaking ability. In most cases, local listeners are recruited to evaluate speech samples in person. However, many teaching and research contexts, recruiting may not be possible or advisable. The goal this study was hone reliable method L2 online through Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT) usin...

Reputation systems provide a valuable method to measure the trustworthiness of sellers or the quality of products in an e-commerce environment. Due to their economic importance, reputation systems are subject to many attacks. A common problem are unfair ratings which are used to unfairly increase or decrease the reputation of an entity. Although being of high practical relevance, unfair rating ...

Online consumer ratings and reviews have become very popular among online retailers and are found to influence the sales of experience goods. However, their effects on the sales of search or quasi-experience goods remain unknown. Using data collected from Amazon.com, we examine how the impacts of consumer ratings and reviews differ across product categories. Our results suggest that the sales o...