 Are numeric ratings true representations of reviews? A study of inconsistency between reviews and ratingsBidyut Hazarika, Kuanchin Chen and Muhammad Razi International Journal of Business Information Systems, 2021, vol. 38, issue 1, 85-106 Abstract: Consistency between review messages and ratings has been an implicit assumption of many product review studies. However, such an assumption has never been critically examined. Our study investigates the consistency between app reviews and their corresponding ratings to uncover insights on the nature of inconsistency and how that inconsistency relates to fee structure (paid or free) and product category. To examine this inconsistency, we collected data from the iTunes store. We used sentiment mining to measure the discrepancy between the review sentiment and the ratings of the app. Our findings show that the assumption of consistency between product ratings and product reviews do not always hold. Findings support the existence of inconsistency, but not for all product categories. As the groups of apps differ in their consistency patterns, future researchers are recommended not to lump all apps together. Doing so, could obscure the distinctive difference among these apps, thereby offering less insight from the collected data. Keywords: product ratings; product reviews; review sentiment; app versions; iTunes; app categories. (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ids:ijbisy:v:38:y:2021:i:1:p:85-106 Access Statistics for this article More articles in International Journal of Business Information Systems from Inderscience Enterprises Ltd |
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