Wednesday, August 15, 2012

REVIEWS AND COMMENTS


Should You Trust Online Reviews?
Yes and no.  http://www.slate.com
By Ray Fisman|Posted Tuesday, Aug. 14, 2012,

Are they genuine hotel guests, staff, or actors?  Photo by Creatas/Thinkstock.
The Internet has fundamentally changed the way that buyers and sellers meet and interact in the marketplace. Online retailers make it cheap and easy to browse, comparison shop, and make purchases with the click of a mouse. The Web can also, in theory, make for better-informed purchases—both online and off—thanks to sites that offer crowd sourced reviews of everything from dog walkers to dentists.
In a Web-enabled world, it should be harder for careless or unscrupulous businesses to exploit consumers. Yet recent studies suggest that online reviewing is hardly a perfect consumer defense system. Researchers at Yale, Dartmouth, and USC have found evidence that hotel owners post fake reviews to boost their ratings on the site—and might even be posting negative reviews of nearby competitors.
The preponderance of online reviews speaks to their basic weakness: Because it’s essentially free to post a review, it’s all too easy to dash off thoughtless praise or criticism, or, worse, to construct deliberately misleading reviews without facing any consequences. It’s what economists (and others) refer to as the cheap-talk problem. The obvious solution is to make it more costly to post a review, but that eliminates one of the main virtues of crowdsourcing: There is much more wisdom in a crowd of millions than in select opinions of a few dozen.
Of course, that wisdom depends on reviewers giving honest feedback. A few well-publicized incidents suggest that’s not always the case. For example, when Amazon’s Canadian site accidentally revealed the identitiesof anonymous book reviewers in 2004, it became apparent that many reviews came from publishers and from the authors themselves.
Technological idealists, perhaps not surprisingly, see a solution to this problem in cutting-edge computer science. One widely reported study last year showed that a text-analysis algorithm proved remarkably adept at detecting made-up reviews. The researchers instructed freelance writers to put themselves in the role of a hotel marketer who has been tasked by his boss with writing a fake customer review that is flattering to the hotel. They also compiled a set of comparison TripAdvisor reviews that the study’s authors felt were likely to be genuine. Human judges could not distinguish between the real ones and the fakes. But the algorithm correctly identified the reviews as real or phony with 90 percent accuracy by picking up on subtle differences, like whether the review described specific aspects of the hotel room layout (the real ones do) or mentioned matters that were unrelated to the hotel itself, like whether the reviewer was there on vacation or business (a marker of fakes). Great, but in the cat-and-mouse game of fraud vs. fraud detection, phony reviewers can now design feedback that won’t set off any alarm bells.
Just how prevalent are fake reviews? A trio of business school professors, Yale’s Judith ChevalierYaniv Dover of Dartmouth, and USC’s Dina Mayzlin, have taken a clever approach to inferring an answer by comparing the reviews on two travel sites, TripAdvisor and Expedia . . . .
Full article on Slate.com: http://www.slate.com

Peter’s Comment

Fake reviews of products and services may be much more common than many people think.

Think about it this way: You shop at the same supermarket regularly and sometimes you tell the staff or your friends that you like the service or the prices. But how often would you go to the supermarket website and post a favorable comment? Probably never.

However, on some websites reviews, always favorable, take up most of the space and are the main focus – apart from getting your money. I regard those sites with suspicion. Most notable are the website that promise $10,000 a month working from home, part time, with no experience needed.  One such site has ‘feedback’ from a lady with the same name, previously unemployed and commenting from Auckland, Melbourne and a dozen of cities around the world. She is a fake and so is the company behind the website.

Book reviews by professional book reviewers I regard as genuine, but also purely a matter of opinion. A good book to one person may be trash to another reader. It depends on personal taste. It should also be remembered that professional book reviewers only review books from traditional publishers as a general rule. But we live in a world where self-publishing, also known as indie-publishing, is fast becoming the norm and many books now go to market without reviews.

My first book, published in 1966 by a traditional publisher, received a favorable review in several newspapers and at least one magazine. By contrast my next six books, all indie-published, have not been reviewed by any major newspaper and published comments from readers have been rare.

But that does not mean that these books have not been selling or that readers didn’t enjoy them.  The comments come person to person, always favorable and usually with a request for the next book, or all the remaining books. A large number of my current readers have a complete set, not including the first book which sold out forty years ago.

Readers of this blog appear to fall into a different category with a small number of readers leaving nice comments which I greatly appreciate. It makes it all worthwhile. I always publish comments exactly as they are written. I don’t edit them. The only comments not published are those that blatantly seek free advertising for a commercial business and those that are written so poorly that even Albert Einstein would have declared their meaning beyond discovery. Fortunately there are very few of those.

My books are available in print or electronic versions. The e-book versions are available at prices that are only a fraction of the print price. Each has a free sample that can be downloaded to an e-reader device or PC and one book, Nathaniel’s Bloodline, can be downloaded in its entirety completely free.





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