If a book on Amazon.com, the leading online retailer, already has hundreds of reviews, is it worth bothering to add another? Evidently some people think it is. Peter Hoflich, a financial journalist based in Singapore, recently wrote the 3,250th review of "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows", for example. "I wonder if anyone will benefit from my review, especially since there are so many," he muses. Oddly enough, somebody might. That is because the raw number of reviews or comments, and the proportion of positive and negative ones, send useful signals to other people, even if they do not trawl through all of them. Accordingly, websites make it as easy as possible for people to add their comments.rnAmazon was a pioneer in this regard: it has allowed customers to post reviews of books and other products for many years. Initially, publishers and authors were worried that allowing negative reviews would hurt sales. Online retailers have generally been reluctant to allow users to leave comments, says John McAteer, Google's retail industry director, who runs shopping.google.com, the internet giant's comparison-shopping site. But a handful of bad reviews, it seems, are worth having. "No one trusts all positive reviews," he says. So a small proportion of negative comments-"just enough to acknowledge that the product couldn't be perfect"-can actually make an item more attractive to prospective buyers.
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