Using Online Conversations to Study Word-of-Mouth Communication
Marketing Science
Promotional Chat on the Internet
Marketing Science
Do online reviews affect product sales? The role of reviewer characteristics and temporal effects
Information Technology and Management
Yahoo! for Amazon: Sentiment Extraction from Small Talk on the Web
Management Science
The long tail or the short tail: The category-specific impact of eWOM on sales distribution
Decision Support Systems
Using online search data to forecast new product sales
Decision Support Systems
Manipulation of online reviews: An analysis of ratings, readability, and sentiments
Decision Support Systems
Electronic word of mouth analysis for service experience
Expert Systems with Applications: An International Journal
Deriving market intelligence from microblogs
Decision Support Systems
βP: A novel approach to filter out malicious rating profiles from recommender systems
Decision Support Systems
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Built upon the discretionary accrual-based earnings management framework, our paper develops a discretionary manipulation proxy to study the management of online reviews. We reveal that fraudulent review manipulation is a serious problem for 1) non-bestseller books; 2) books whose reviews are classified as not very helpful; 3) books that experience greater variability in the helpfulness of their online reviews; and 4) popular books as well as high-priced books. We also show that review management decreases with the passage of time. Just like fraudulent earnings management, manipulated online reviews reflect inauthentic information from which consumers might derive wrong valuation especially for books with the above characteristics and be persuaded to purchase the wrong item. The findings from this research sound a note of caution for all consumers that make use of online reviews of books for making purchases and encourage them to delve deeper into the reviews without getting trapped in their fraudulent manipulation.