ABSTRACT

Online reviews remain a reliable source for customers when making purchase decisions. Yet, the pervasiveness of fake reviews jeopardises this reliability and questions the quality of this content. In this paper, we provide empirical evidence from a major online retailer that mitigation against fakery can be successful. To that end, we proposed, tested, and validated an approach, based on existing safeguards, to quantify the credibility of reviews and thus reliably reduce product uncertainty. We also showed that reviews with sufficient credibility signals were effective at influencing product sales, and this influence was prevalent for both niche and new products on the market. As such, this study offers a novel approach to mitigate the impact of fakery in reviews posted to online infomediaries. Our work focuses primarily on Amazon as a major retailer but also provides further support by drawing on Yelp, another major review platform.

摘要

在做出购买决定时，在线评论仍然是客户的可靠来源。然而，虚假评论的普遍性危及这种可靠性并质疑这些内容的质量。在本文中，我们提供了来自一家主要在线零售商的经验证据，证明可以成功地防止造假。为此，我们提出、测试和验证了一种基于现有保障措施的方法，以量化评论的可信度，从而可靠地减少产品的不确定性。我们还表明，具有足够可信度信号的评论在影响产品销售方面是有效的，这种影响在市场上的利基产品和新产品中都很普遍。因此，本研究提供了一种新颖的方法来减轻发布到在线信息中介的评论中造假的影响。