Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Can Online Reviews Reveal A Product's True Quality? Empirical Findings Analytical Modeling Of Online Word-Of-Mouth Communication, Nan Hu, Paul Pavlou, Jennifer Zhang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

As a digital version of word-of-mouth, online review has become a major information source for consumers and has very important implications for a wide range of management activities. While some researchers focus their studies on the impact of online product review on sales, an important assumption remains unexamined, that is, can online product review reveal the true quality of the product? To test the validity of this key assumption, this paper first empirically tests the underlying distribution of online reviews with data from Amazon. The results show that 53% of the products have a bimodal and non-normal distribution. For these …