Are Amazon.com Online Review Helpfulness Ratings Biased or Not?

摘要

The helpfulness rating of Amazon product review, a popular vote feature used by Amazon to rank product reviews and display them to online shoppers, has important implications for online shopping decisions. This research investigates how objective those helpfulness ratings are. The general assumption is that the ratings are "representative" views of the shoppers. However, previous studies on product reviews indicate bias may also exist among helpfulness ratings. Using the survey questionnaire, the study found that there were indeed significant differences between the helpfulness ratings displayed at Amazon.com and those from a simulated online shopper population. The survey results also show that there are evidences of rating differences by gender, age, ethnicity, income and mobile device use for shopping. Thus the "true" ratings on online user reviews may well be quite different from what we see at Amazon.com. Implications and limitations of this research are discussed.