Sales Impact of Reviews with Verified and Non-Verified Purchases: Which Reviews Matter, When, and Why

Category: Marketing Seminar
When: 24 March 2022
, 15:00
 - 16:15
Where: RuW 1.201
Speaker: Ashwin Malshe University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA)

On Thursday March 24 from 15:00-16:15 o’clock, Ashwin Malshe (resume) from The University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA) will be giving a seminar talk at our department. The talk will take place in room RuW 1.201. The title and the abstract of the talk can be found below.

Title: Sales Impact of Reviews with Verified and Non-Verified Purchases: Which Reviews Matter, When, and Why

Abstract:

Online platforms have started using verified purchase reviews (VPR) to address consumers’ concerns over review manipulation. However, it is unknown whether, when, and why VPR affects product sales relative to non-verified purchase reviews (non-VPR). The authors conduct two studies to examine the performance implications of VPR on product sales. In Study 1, the authors estimate a Bayesian dynamic linear model using 74,743 online reviews of 304 books to examine the differential impacts between VPR and non-VPR valence over a book’s lifecycle. They find that VPR valence has more pronounced overall impacts on book sales rank than non-VPR valence for the books written by bestselling authors (vs. non-bestselling authors). More importantly, the difference between the impacts of VPR and non-VPR valence is larger when the books written by bestselling authors are new but attenuates later in the book lifecycle. In Study 2, the authors use an experiment to show that VPR increases consumers’ purchase intentions because (i) consumers are more likely to attribute the motivation behind review writing to product experience, and (ii) consumers subsequently equate this attribution to review credibility. These findings have substantive implications for online platforms.

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