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Paper #1: The Influence of Mean Product Ratings on Review Judgments and Search
Daniel Katz, Booth School of Business, University of
Chicago, USA
Dan Bartels, Booth School of Business, University of Chicago, USA
Paper #2: Would you Use a South-Pointing Compass? Consumers Underestimate the Informativeness of Systematic Disagreement
Quentin André, Leeds School of Business, University of Colorado Boulder, USA
Samuel Hirshman, Norwegian School of Economics, Norway
Nicholas Reinholtz, Leeds School of Business, University of
Colorado Boulder, USA
Paper #3: Set Aside: Consumers Neglect Set Size when Evaluating Ranked Products
Uri Barnea, Bocconi School of Management, Bocconi
University, Milan, Italy
Alice Moon, The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, USA
Jackie Silverman, Lerner College of Business, University of Delaware, USA
Paper #4: Cold, Rain, and Snow: Trouble for Star Ratings
Matt Meister, Leeds School of Business, University of Colorado Boulder, USA
Nicholas Reinholtz, Leeds School of Business, University of Colorado Boulder, USA
SESSION OVERVIEW
The widespread availability of online reviews and ratings has dramatically changed consumers' shopping experiences. In the preinternet world, consumers mostly relied on advice from friends and family, marketing communications, or expert ratings (such as Consumer Reports) to make their decisions. Nowadays, over 90% of buyers rely on online user-generated content (in the form of ratings or text reviews) to decide whether to buy and what to buy (Qualtrics, 2020).
Following this revolution, a large literature in marketing has blossomed, discussing topics as diverse as the impact of ratings and reviews on sales (e.g., Chen et al., 2011; Chintagunta et al., 2010) and how this effect compares to other important variables such as price (e.g., Kübler et al., 2018); whether online ratings are reliable predictors of product quality (e.g., de Langhe et al., 2015; Simonson, 2016); what explains the "J-shaped" distribution of product ratings (e.g., Schoenmueller et al., 2020), or which insights firms can gain from online reviews (Tirunillai & Tellis, 2014)...
The present session continues this rich stream of research, with a particular focus on how consumers generate, interpret, and use ratings and reviews. The first paper explores how perceptions of product reviews (what people write about a product) are influenced by product ratings (the star-rating that people give to a product). It finds that reviews that are accompanied with a rating that...