Should You Trust Online
Reviews?
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 Chevalier, Yaniv 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 . . . .
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.
Print books: http://www.gypsybooks.co.nz
Books for e-readers: https://www.smashwords.com/books/search
Books for e-readers: https://www.smashwords.com/books/search
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