Noisy signals: do ratings volatility depend on the length of the consumption span?

David Boto-Garc A and Veronica Leoni

Working Papers from Dipartimento Scienze Economiche, Universita' di Bologna

Abstract: This paper investigates the informational content of online reviews. For the case of hotels, we model how the length of the stay shapes the variance of review scores. Grounded on violations of temporal monotonicity, errors in recall and hedonic adaptation theories, we first present a characterization of how the consumption span affects the non-deterministic component of consumer satisfaction. Next, we conduct an empirical analysis using more than 525,000 individual reviews from Booking.com in 5 major European cities. Under a heteroskedastic framework, we document that individual ratings volatility decreases with the length of the stay. This implies that online ratings from short stayers (short consumption episodes) are noisy signals of the underlying hotel quality. Furthermore, we show that greater volatility in hotel ratings translates into a lower share of useful reviews for subsequent consumers. Our findings offer relevant insights for platform design operators about the sources of ratings volatility and how this affects social learning.

JEL-codes: D12 D83 Z30 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-des, nep-eur and nep-pay
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://amsacta.unibo.it/7230/1/WP1183.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bol:bodewp:wp1183

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Dipartimento Scienze Economiche, Universita' di Bologna Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Dipartimento Scienze Economiche, Universita' di Bologna ().