TY - GEN
T1 - The Good, The Bad and The Picky
T2 - 24th ACM Conference on Economics and Computation, EC 2023
AU - Bondi, Tommaso
AU - Rossi, Michelangelo
AU - Stevens, Ryan
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2023 Owner/Author(s).
PY - 2023/7/9
Y1 - 2023/7/9
N2 - We study the impact of consumer quality-based self-selection on online reviews. Consumers differ in their expertise, which has two effects. First, expertise is instrumental to choice: Experts purchase better products than Non-Experts. Second, because of their superior choices, Experts endogenously form higher reference points, which leads them to post harsher ratings for a given quality. Combined, these two facts imply a bias against higher-quality products. When this bias gets large, ratings are non-monotonic in quality: lower-quality products can obtain higher ratings than superior alternatives, thanks to the lower standard they are held to.
AB - We study the impact of consumer quality-based self-selection on online reviews. Consumers differ in their expertise, which has two effects. First, expertise is instrumental to choice: Experts purchase better products than Non-Experts. Second, because of their superior choices, Experts endogenously form higher reference points, which leads them to post harsher ratings for a given quality. Combined, these two facts imply a bias against higher-quality products. When this bias gets large, ratings are non-monotonic in quality: lower-quality products can obtain higher ratings than superior alternatives, thanks to the lower standard they are held to.
U2 - 10.1145/3580507.3597751
DO - 10.1145/3580507.3597751
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:85168107424
T3 - EC 2023 - Proceedings of the 24th ACM Conference on Economics and Computation
SP - 297
BT - EC 2023 - Proceedings of the 24th ACM Conference on Economics and Computation
PB - Association for Computing Machinery, Inc
Y2 - 9 July 2023 through 12 July 2023
ER -