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Whose Opinions Do We Trust? Some Thoughts On Online Product Ratings And Consumer Decision Making, David Ackerman, Barbara Gross, Jing Hu

Association of Marketing Theory and Practice Proceedings 2024

User-generated reviews play a crucial role in assessing market offerings and informing consumers’ purchase decisions. This study applies extant theory to examine the influence of online product ratings and reviews on consumers. The findings from experiments suggest that the impact of online ratings is heightened for higher-priced products in comparison to their lower-priced counterparts during both the information search and product evaluation stages of consumer decision making. Results also indicate that consumer ratings on social media may have more of an impact on consumers than do the ratings of experts. Consumers demonstrated a greater purchase intention for products that received …