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on Marketing |
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Issue of 2024‒06‒24
two papers chosen by |
| By: | Aleksei Smirnov; Egor Starkov |
| Abstract: | This paper studies strategic communication in the context of social learning. Product reviews are used by consumers to learn product quality, but in order to write a review, a consumer must be convinced to purchase the item first. When reviewers care about welfare of future consumers, this leads to a conflict: a reviewer today wants the future consumers to purchase the item even when this comes at a loss to them, so that more information is revealed for the consumers that come after. We show that due to this conflict, communication via reviews is inevitably noisy, regardless of whether reviewers can commit to a communication strategy or have to resort to cheap talk. The optimal communication mechanism involves truthful communication of extreme experiences and pools the moderate experiences together. |
| Date: | 2024–05 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:arx:papers:2405.05744&r= |
| By: | Shawn Berry |
| Abstract: | The persistence of lying by some consumers in their online posts of experiences with businesses is problematic, and taints the global pool of information that is used for decision making by people that assume they are true accounts of experiences. This study is based on data from my dissertation about fake online Google reviews of restaurants (Berry, 2024), and leverages an instrument that quantifies the trust of people. The findings are based on a sample of n=351, and provide a general proxy for lying in online reviews, and sketch out the characteristics of a typical person that has the propensity to be untruthful. A predictive model of posting untrue online reviews is constructed. The findings have wider implications for the study and monitoring of deceptive behavior, including the propagation of misinformation, and a means of quantifying the potential for antisocial behavior as measured by the trust of people instrument in Berry (2024). Directions for future research and limitations are also discussed. |
| Date: | 2024–05 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:arx:papers:2405.12743&r= |