Reviews without a Purchase: Low Ratings, Loyal Customers, and Deception
Open Access
- 1 June 2014
- journal article
- Published by SAGE Publications in Journal of Marketing Research
- Vol. 51 (3), 249-269
- https://doi.org/10.1509/jmr.13.0209
Abstract
The authors document that approximately 5% of product reviews on a large private label retailer's website are submitted by customers with no record of ever purchasing the product they are reviewing. These reviews are significantly more negative than other reviews. They are also less likely to contain expressions describing the fit or feel of the items and more likely to contain linguistic cues associated with deception. More than 12,000 of the firm's best customers have written reviews without confirmed transactions. On average, these customers have each made more than 150 purchases from the firm. This makes it unlikely that the reviews were written by the employees or agents of a competitor and suggests that deceptive reviews may not be limited to the strategic actions of firms. Instead, the phenomenon may be far more prevalent, extending to individual customers who have no financial incentive to influence product ratings.Keywords
This publication has 36 references indexed in Scilit:
- Word-of-Mouth as Self-EnhancementSSRN Electronic Journal, 2008
- Accuracy of Deception JudgmentsPersonality and Social Psychology Review, 2006
- Posting versus Lurking: Communicating in a Multiple Audience ContextJournal of Consumer Research, 2005
- An Empirical Investigation of Deception Behaviorin Instant MessagingIEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing, 2005
- Who Takes the most Revenge? Individual Differences in Negative Reciprocity Norm EndorsementPersonality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 2004
- How Much Should We Trust Differences-In-Differences Estimates?The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2004
- Lying Words: Predicting Deception from Linguistic StylesPersonality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 2003
- Cues to deception.Psychological Bulletin, 2003
- Spotting Lies: Can Humans Learn to Do Better?Current Directions in Psychological Science, 1994
- The Market Maven: A Diffuser of Marketplace InformationJournal of Marketing, 1987