Promotional Reviews: An Empirical Investigation of Online Review Manipulation

Dina Mayzlin, Yaniv Dover and Judith Chevalier

American Economic Review, 2014, vol. 104, issue 8, 2421-55

Abstract: Firms' incentives to manufacture biased user reviews impede review usefulness. We examine the differences in reviews for a given hotel between two sites: Expedia.com (only a customer can post a review) and TripAdvisor.com (anyone can post). We argue that the net gains from promotional reviewing are highest for independent hotels with single-unit owners and lowest for branded chain hotels with multi-unit owners. We demonstrate that the hotel neighbors of hotels with a high incentive to fake have more negative reviews on TripAdvisor relative to Expedia; hotels with a high incentive to fake have more positive reviews on TripAdvisor relative to Expedia.

JEL-codes: L15 L83 M31 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
Note: DOI: 10.1257/aer.104.8.2421
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (259)

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Working Paper: Promotional Reviews: An Empirical Investigation of Online Review Manipulation (2012)
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