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On Self-Selection Biases In Online Product Reviews, Nan Hu, Paul A. Pavlou, Jie Zhang
On Self-Selection Biases In Online Product Reviews, Nan Hu, Paul A. Pavlou, Jie Zhang
Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems
Online product reviews help consumers infer product quality, and the mean (average) rating is often used as a proxy for product quality. However, two self-selection biases, acquisition bias (mostly consumers with a favorable predisposition acquire a product and hence write a product review) and underreporting bias (consumers with extreme, either positive or negative, ratings are more likely to write reviews than consumers with moderate product ratings), render the mean rating a biased estimator of product quality, and they result in the well-known J-shaped (positively skewed, asymmetric, bimodal) distribution of online product reviews. To better understand the nature and consequences of …