Creating and detecting fake reviews of online products

Joni Salminen, Chandrashekhar Kandpal, Ahmed Mohamed Kamel, Soon-gyo Jung and Bernard J. Jansen

Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services, 2022, vol. 64, issue C

Abstract: Customers increasingly rely on reviews for product information. However, the usefulness of online reviews is impeded by fake reviews that give an untruthful picture of product quality. Therefore, detection of fake reviews is needed. Unfortunately, so far, automatic detection has only had partial success in this challenging task. In this research, we address the creation and detection of fake reviews. First, we experiment with two language models, ULMFiT and GPT-2, to generate fake product reviews based on an Amazon e-commerce dataset. Using the better model, GPT-2, we create a dataset for a classification task of fake review detection. We show that a machine classifier can accomplish this goal near-perfectly, whereas human raters exhibit significantly lower accuracy and agreement than the tested algorithms. The model was also effective on detected human generated fake reviews. The results imply that, while fake review detection is challenging for humans, “machines can fight machines†in the task of detecting fake reviews. Our findings have implications for consumer protection, defense of firms from unfair competition, and responsibility of review platforms.

Keywords: Fake reviews; Detection; e-commerce; eWOM; Marketing (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (18)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:joreco:v:64:y:2022:i:c:s0969698921003374

DOI: 10.1016/j.jretconser.2021.102771

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