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Exploiting social media for fake reviews

Exploiting social media for fake reviews We provide an overview of our recent work that studies the market for fake product reviews on Amazon.com where reviews are purchased in large private internet groups on Facebook and other sites. We find that a wide array of products purchase fake reviews, including products with many reviews and high average ratings. Buying fake reviews on Facebook is associated with a significant but short-term increase in average rating and number of reviews. We exploit a sharp but temporary policy shift by Amazon to show that rating manipulation has a large causal effect on sales. Finally, we examine whether rating manipulation harms consumers or whether it is mostly used by high-quality or young products in a manner akin to advertising. We find that after firms stop buying fake reviews, their average ratings fall and the share of one-star reviews increases significantly, particularly for young products, indicating rating manipulation is mostly used by low-quality products and is deceiving and harming consumers. http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png ACM SIGecom Exchanges Association for Computing Machinery

Exploiting social media for fake reviews

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Publisher
Association for Computing Machinery
Copyright
Copyright © 2021 Copyright is held by the owner/author(s)
ISSN
1551-9031
eISSN
1551-9031
DOI
10.1145/3505156.3505164
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

We provide an overview of our recent work that studies the market for fake product reviews on Amazon.com where reviews are purchased in large private internet groups on Facebook and other sites. We find that a wide array of products purchase fake reviews, including products with many reviews and high average ratings. Buying fake reviews on Facebook is associated with a significant but short-term increase in average rating and number of reviews. We exploit a sharp but temporary policy shift by Amazon to show that rating manipulation has a large causal effect on sales. Finally, we examine whether rating manipulation harms consumers or whether it is mostly used by high-quality or young products in a manner akin to advertising. We find that after firms stop buying fake reviews, their average ratings fall and the share of one-star reviews increases significantly, particularly for young products, indicating rating manipulation is mostly used by low-quality products and is deceiving and harming consumers.

Journal

ACM SIGecom Exchanges – Association for Computing Machinery

Published: Dec 6, 2021

Keywords: eCommerce

References

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