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We explore the consequences of consumer heterogeneity on online word of mouth. Consumers differ in their experience, which has two effects. First, experience is instrumental to choice: experts purchase and review better products than non-experts. Second, because of their superior choices, experts endogenously form higher expectations, and thus post more stringent ratings given quality. Combined, these two forces imply that the better the product, the higher the standard it is held to, the more stringent its rating. Thus, relative ratings are biased: low quality products enjoy unfairly high ratings compared to their superior alternatives. When this bias gets large, reputation needs not be increasing in quality. The bias needs not disappear, and can worsen, over time: products with unfairly high ratings mostly attract unexperienced consumers, reinforcing their advantage. We test our theory by scraping data from a well known movie ratings website. We find strong evidence for both of our hypotheses, and that this bias is quantitatively important. We then debias the ratings, and find that the new ones better correlate with the opinions of external critics.

Sam Maglio, Professor, University of Toronto Scarborough 

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Choice Protection for Feeling-Focused Decisions

Synopsis

Consumers live life in the present while also anticipating and choosing for the future. This everyday experience assumes that the present and the future are distinct, successive periods in time. But when do consumers think one ends and the next begins? Intuitively, 5 years forward in time departs sufficiently from right now to fall well within the future in a way that 5 seconds forward does not. The ambiguity can be illustrated in considering 5 days forward, which might be considered part of the present or as belonging to the future. This research first documents that the felt duration of the present varies naturally between individuals and also responds to interventions that manipulate it. Appraisals of the present, in turn, are shown to color far-sighted judgment and decision making using a series of incentive-compatible experiments and field studies. Specifically, seeing the present as relatively short and the future as starting sooner causes consumers to act more generously (e.g., to save money rather than spend it) in the interest of their future selves.

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2019 Marketing Camp

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