Do online reviews reflect a product's true perceived quality? An investigation of online movie reviews across cultures

Authors:
Noi Sian Koh;Nan Hu;Eric K. Clemons
Affiliations:
Singapore Management University, 80 Stamford Road, Singapore 178902, Singapore;Singapore Management University, 80 Stamford Road, Singapore 178902, Singapore;The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, 3730 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA 19104-6340, United States
Venue:
Electronic Commerce Research and Applications
Year:
2010

Citing 6
Cited 6

The Digitization of Word of Mouth: Promise and Challenges of Online Feedback Mechanisms

Management Science
Can online reviews reveal a product's true quality?: empirical findings and analytical modeling of Online word-of-mouth communication

EC '06 Proceedings of the 7th ACM conference on Electronic commerce
The future of advertising and the value of social network websites: some preliminary examinations

Proceedings of the ninth international conference on Electronic commerce
Consumer informedness and diverse consumer purchasing behaviors: Traditional mass-market, trading down, and trading out into the long tail

Electronic Commerce Research and Applications
How Information Changes Consumer Behavior and How Consumer Behavior Determines Corporate Strategy

Journal of Management Information Systems
You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto

You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto

Walk the talk: analyzing the relation between implicit and explicit feedback for preference elicitation

UMAP'11 Proceedings of the 19th international conference on User modeling, adaption, and personalization
Discovering target groups in social networking sites: An effective method for maximizing joint influential power

Electronic Commerce Research and Applications
Measuring the coverage and redundancy of information search services on e-commerce platforms

Electronic Commerce Research and Applications
Negative online word-of-mouth: Behavioral indicator or emotional release?

Computers in Human Behavior
How online social ties and product-related risks influence purchase intentions: A Facebook experiment

Electronic Commerce Research and Applications
An investigation of information sharing and seeking behaviors in online investment communities

Computers in Human Behavior

Quantified Score

Hi-index	0.00

Visualization

Abstract

This paper investigates when the reported average of online ratings matches the perceived average assessment of the population as a whole, including the average assessments of both raters and non-raters. We apply behavioral theory to capture intentions in rating online movie reviews in two dissimilar countries - China and the United States. We argue that consumers' rating behaviors are affected by cultural influences and that they are influenced in predictable ways. Based on data collected from IMDB.com and Douban.com, we found significant differences across raters from these two different cultures. Additionally, we examined how cultural elements influence rating behavior for a hybrid culture - Singapore. To study whether online consumer reviews are subjected to under-reporting bias, which is, consumers with extreme opinions are more likely to report their opinions than consumers with moderate reviews causing online reviews to be a biased estimator of a product's true quality, we compare the consumer reviews posted online with those from an experimental study. Our results shows that under-reporting is more prevalent among US online network, thus online reviews are a better movie perceived quality proxy in China and Singapore than in the US.