The Market for Reviews: Strategic Behaviour of Online Product Reviewers in Competitive Review Markets with Monetary Incentives

Description

Online review systems use monetary incentives to improve review quality and quantity. But if re-viewers compete for incentives and payments are contingent on review helpfulness, review writing and helpfulness voting behaviour becomes governed by strategic considerations. Ultimately, these considerations can lead to the “market for review” collapsing. The review system is then useless for consumers in terms of reducing information search and product evaluation cost. We use game theo-ry to explain and predict adverse effects of monetary incentives in review systems. The behaviour of online product reviewers corresponds to strategic interactions in a public goods game. We conduct a multi-round multi-stage experiment to capture time-contingent effects. Our results indicate that in the presence of monetary incentives strategic voting does indeed take place, but that review writing behaviour remains virtually unaffected. Monetary incentives apparently do not affect review quality adversely but they do destroy the signalling power of helpfulness ratings to indicate high-quality reviews.

Period	30 Sept 2013 → 2 Oct 2013
Event title	Jahrestagung der Gesellschaft für experimentelle Wirtschaftsforschung e.V. (GfeW)
Event type	Unkonwn
Degree of Recognition	International