Firms have considered various forms of incentives for writing reviews, including the use of extrinsic rewards to attract reviewers. Building on this literature, we study the implications of monetary incentives on online reviews in the context of a natural experiment, where one review platform suddenly began offering monetary incentives for writing reviews. We refer to this as the treated platform. Along with data from Amazon.com and using the difference-in-differences approach, we compare the quantity and quality of reviews before and after rewards were introduced in the treated platform. We find that reviews are significantly more positive but that the quality decreases. Taking advantage of the panel data, we also evaluate the effect of rewards on existing reviewers. We find that their level of participation after monetary incentives decreases but not their quality of participation. Last, even though the platform enjoys an increase in the number of new reviewers, disproportionately more reviews appear to be written for highly rated products. The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/isre.2017.0750 .

Although the role of users in maintaining security is regularly emphasized, this is often not matched by an accompanying level of support. Indeed, users are frequently given insufficient guidance to enable effective security choices and decisions, which can lead to perceived bad behaviour as a consequence. This paper discusses the forms of support that are possible, and seeks to investigate the effect of doing so in practice. Specifically, it presents findings from two experimental studies that investigate how variations in password meter usage and feedback can positively affect the resulting password choices. The first experiment examines the difference between passwords selected by unguided users versus those receiving guidance and alternative forms of feedback (ranging from a traditional password meter through to an emoji-based approach). The findings reveal a 30% drop in weak password choices between unguided and guided usage, with the varying meters then delivering up to 10% further improvement. The second experiment then considers variations in the form of feedback message that users may receive in addition to a meter-based rating. It is shown that by providing richer information (e.g. based upon the time required to crack a password, its relative ranking against other choices, or the probability of it being cracked), users are more motivated towards making strong choices and changing initially weak ones. While the specifics of the experimental findings were focused upon passwords, the discussion also considers the benefits that may be gained by applying the same principles of nudging and guidance to other areas of security in which users are often found to have weak behaviours.

Product review platforms in online marketplaces differ with respect to the granularity of product quality information they provide. While some platforms provide a single overall rating for product quality (also referred to as the single-dimensional rating scheme), others provide a separate rating for each individual quality attribute (also referred to as the multidimensional rating scheme). The multidimensional rating scheme is superior to the single-dimensional rating scheme, ceteris paribus, in reducing consumers’ uncertainty about product quality and value. However, we show that, when sellers respond to product ratings by adjusting their prices, compared to the single-dimensional rating scheme, the multidimensional rating scheme does not always benefit consumers, nor does it necessarily benefit sellers or society. The uncertainty associated with quality attribute rating and the extent of differentiation between competing products determines whether a finer-grained multidimensional rating scheme is superior to a coarser-grained single-dimensional rating scheme from the consumer, seller, and social planner perspectives. The main driver of the results is that more (less) granular and less (more) uncertain information exposes (hides) underlying differentiation, or a lack thereof, between competing products, which, in turn, alters upstream price competition in the presence of heterogeneous consumer preferences. The results demonstrate that focusing on the information transfer aspect of rating schemes provides only a partial understanding of the true impacts of rating schemes.

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We investigate an editorial review program for which a review platform supplements user reviews with editorial ones written by professional writers. Specifically, we examine whether and how editorial reviews influence subsequent user reviews (reviews written by noneditor reviewers). A quasiexperiment conducted on a leading review platform in Asia, based on several econometric and natural language processing techniques, yields empirical evidence of an overall positive effect of editorial reviews on subsequent user reviews from the platform’s perspective. First, more reviews are provided for restaurants that receive editorial reviews. In addition, these reviews discuss substantive topics while also including a discussion on other topics, leading to a net increase in content length and variety. They also are more neutral in sentiment and are associated with lower rating valences. Further analysis of the mechanism reveals that the subsequent user reviews of the restaurants that receive editorial reviews become more similar to the editorial reviews in regard to topics, sentiment/rating, length, and readability, indicating a herding effect in how to write a review as the main driver of the change in the subsequent reviews. We further empirically isolate this herding effect among long-time reviewers. The findings suggest that review platforms could use an editorial review program not only to boost the quantitative aspect of user reviews but also, to manage the qualitative aspect as well. This paper was accepted by Kartik Hosanagar, information systems.