The Enrollment Effect: A Study of Amazon's Vine Program

Abstract

Do rewards from retailers such as free products and recognition in the form of status badges 1 influence the recipient's behavior? We present a novel application of natural language processing to detect differences in consumer behavior due to such rewards. Specifically, we investigate the "Enrollment" effect, i.e. whether receiving products for free affect how consumer reviews are written. Using data from Amazon's Vine program, we conduct a detailed analysis to detect stylistic differences in product reviews written by reviewers before and after enrollment in the Vine program. Our analysis suggests that the "Enrollment" effect exists. Further, we are able to characterize the effect on syntactic and semantic dimensions. This work has implications for researchers, firms and consumer advocates studying the influence of user-generated content as these changes in style could potentially influence consumer decisions.