The Problem With Online Ratings Harvard Case Solution & Analysis

In the digital age, we are flooded with other people's opinions. We glance through publications on Amazon with understanding of how other consumers liked (or disliked) a particular time. On Expedia, we contrast resorts predicated on user ratings. On YouTube, we can take a look at a video's thumbs-up/thumbs down score to help verify if it's significant to our time. For the most part, consumers view them as trustworthy and have faith in ratings that are internet. But, the author claims, this confidence may be absent. The heart of the issue lies with our herd instincts - natural person impulses defined by a deficiency of individual decision making - that induce us to think and act in the same way as other folks around us.

As it pertains to internet ratings, our herd instincts unite with our susceptibility to favorable "societal influence."When we see that others have valued a specific novel, loved a resort or restaurant or liked a special physician, this could cause us to feel the same positive feelings and to supply a similarly high online rating. The writer describes an experiment that he and two colleagues conducted on a social news-aggregation site. The researchers randomly manipulated the scores of comments with a single up or down vote and then measured the impact of these little manipulations on subsequent scores. The results were stunning. The manipulations that were positive created a favorable societal influence prejudice that continued over five months and the evaluations that were comments'final finally raised by 25%. This social-influence prejudice snowballs into disproportionately high scores, developing a tendency toward positive evaluations bubbles. A favorable vote did not just affect the mean of the ratings distribution; it pushed the upper tail of the distribution out as well, meaning remarks could be propelled by a single positive vote at the beginning to ratings stardom.

The Problem With Online Ratings Case Study Solution

PUBLICATION DATE: January 01, 2014 PRODUCT #: SMR476-PDF-ENG

This is just an excerpt. This case is about SALES & MARKETING

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