Publication Type
Journal Article
Version
publishedVersion
Publication Date
2-2011
Abstract
Built upon the discretionary accrual-based earnings management framework, our paper develops a discretionary manipulation proxy to study the management of online reviews. We reveal that fraudulent review manipulation is a serious problem for 1) non-bestseller books; 2) books whose reviews are classified as not very helpful; 3) books that experience greater variability in the helpfulness of their online reviews; and 4) popular books as well as high-priced books. We also show that review management decreases with the passage of time. Just like fraudulent earnings management, manipulated online reviews reflect inauthentic information from which consumers might derive wrong valuation especially for books with the above characteristics and be persuaded to purchase the wrong item. The findings from this research sound a note of caution for all consumers that make use of online reviews of books for making purchases and encourage them to delve deeper into the reviews without getting trapped in their fraudulent manipulation.
Keywords
Book reviews, Empirical study, Fraudulent manipulation, Online word-of-mouth, Regression analysis, Review management, Review manipulation
Discipline
Computer Sciences | E-Commerce | Social Media
Research Areas
Data Science and Engineering
Publication
Decision Support Systems
Volume
50
Issue
3
First Page
627
Last Page
635
ISSN
0167-9236
Identifier
10.1016/j.dss.2010.08.013
Publisher
Elsevier
Citation
HU, Nan; BOSE, Indranil; GAO, Yunjun; and LIU, Ling.
Manipulation in digital word-of-mouth: A reality check for book reviews. (2011). Decision Support Systems. 50, (3), 627-635.
Available at: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sis_research/8219
Copyright Owner and License
Publisher
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.
Additional URL
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dss.2010.08.013