Finding the Wise and the Wisdom in a Crowd: Estimating Underlying Qualities of Reviewers and Items

Nicolas Carayol and Matthew Jackson

The Economic Journal, 2024, vol. 134, issue 663, 2712-2745

Abstract: Consumers, businesses and organisations rely on others’ ratings of items when making choices. However, individual reviewers vary in their accuracy and some are biased—either systematically over- or under-rating items relative to others’ tastes, or even deliberately distorting a rating. We describe how to process ratings by a group of reviewers over a set of items and evaluate the individual reviewers’ accuracies and biases, in a way that yields unbiased and consistent estimates of the items’ true qualities. We provide Monte Carlo simulations that showcase the added value of our technique even with small data sets, and we show that this improvement increases as the number of items increases. Revisiting the famous 1976 wine tasting that compared Californian and Bordeaux wines, accounting for the substantial variation in reviewers’ biases and accuracies results in a ranking that differs from the original average rating. We also illustrate the power of this methodology with an application to more than 45,000 ratings of ‘en primeur’ Bordeaux fine wines by expert critics. Those data show that our estimated wine qualities significantly predict prices when controlling for prominent experts’ ratings and numerous fixed effects. We also find that the elasticity of a wine price in an expert’s ratings increases with that expert’s accuracy.

Date: 2024
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/ej/ueae045 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
Working Paper: Finding the Wise and the Wisdom in a Crowd: Estimating Underlying Qualities of Reviewers and Items (2024)
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:oup:econjl:v:134:y:2024:i:663:p:2712-2745.

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://academic.oup.com/journals

Access Statistics for this article

The Economic Journal is currently edited by Francesco Lippi

More articles in The Economic Journal from Royal Economic Society Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press () and ().