research-article

Open access

Leveraging Social Media to Buy Fake Reviews

Authors:

Sherry He,

Brett Hollenbeck,

Davide ProserpioAuthors Info & Claims

Communications of the ACM, Volume 66, Issue 10

Pages 98 - 105

https://doi.org/10.1145/3615428

Published: 22 September 2023 Publication History

All formats PDF

Abstract

We study the market for fake product reviews on Amazon.com. Reviews are purchased in large private groups on Facebook and other sites. We hand collect data on these markets and then collect a panel of data on these products' ratings and reviews on Amazon, as well as their sales rank, advertising, and pricing policies. We find that a wide array of products purchase fake reviews, including products with many reviews and high average ratings. Buying fake reviews on Facebook is associated with a significant but short-term increase in average rating and number of reviews. We exploit a sharp but temporary policy shift by Amazon to show that rating manipulation has a large causal effect on sales. Finally, we examine whether rating manipulation harms consumers or whether it is mainly used by high-quality in a manner like advertising or by new products trying to solve the cold-start problem. We find that after firms stop buying fake reviews, their average ratings fall and the share of one-star reviews increases significantly, particularly for young products, indicating rating manipulation is mostly used by low-quality products.

References

[1]

Cabral, L., Hortacsu, A. The dynamics of seller reputation: Evidence from eBay. J. Indus. Econ. 58, 1 (2010), 54--78.

Crossref

Google Scholar

[2]

Dellarocas, C. Strategic manipulation of internet opinion forums: Implications for consumers and firms. Manage. Sci. 52, 10 (2006), 1577--1593.

Digital Library

Google Scholar

[3]

Einav, L., Farronato, C., Levin, J. Peer-to-peer markets. Annu. Rev. Econ. 8, 1 (2016), 615--635.

Crossref

Google Scholar

[4]

He, S., Hollenbeck, B. Sales and rank on amazon.com. Available from: SSRN 3728281. 2020.

Google Scholar

[5]

He, S., Hollenbeck, B., Proserpio, D. The market for fake reviews. Market. Sci. 41, 5 (2022), 896--921.

Digital Library

Google Scholar

[6]

Hollenbeck, B. Online reputation mechanisms and the decreasing value of chain affiliation. J. Market. Res. 55, 5 (2018), 636--654.

Crossref

Google Scholar

[7]

Hollenbeck, B., Moorthy, S., Proserpio, D. Advertising strategy in the presence of reviews: An empirical analysis. Market. Sci. 38, 5 (2019), 793--811.

Digital Library

Google Scholar

[8]

Luca, M., Zervas, G. Fake it till you make it: Reputation, competition, and yelp review fraud. Manage. Sci. 62, 12 (2016), 3412--3427.

Digital Library

Google Scholar

[9]

Mayzlin, D., Dover, Y., Chevalier, J. Promotional reviews: An empirical investigation of online review manipulation. Am. Econ. Rev. 104 (2014), 2421--2455.

Crossref

Google Scholar

[10]

Milgrom, P., Roberts, J. Prices and advertising signals of product quality. J. Political Econ. 94 (1986), 297--310.

Crossref

Google Scholar

[11]

Nelson, P. Information and consumer behavior. J. Political Econ. 78, 2 (1970), 311--329.

Crossref

Google Scholar

[12]

Nosko, C., Tadelis, S. The limits of reputation in platform markets: An empirical analysis and field experiment. NBER Working Paper 20830 (2015).

Google Scholar

[13]

Tadelis, S. Reputation and feedback systems in online platform markets. Annu. Rev. Econ. 8, 1 (2016), 321--340.

Crossref

Google Scholar

Cited By

View all

Kannal NAsmathunnisa NKallimani J(2024)Impacts of Fake Reviews on Dietary Supplements and Healthcare Products in Social Media2024 15th International Conference on Computing Communication and Networking Technologies (ICCCNT)10.1109/ICCCNT61001.2024.10725718(1-4)Online publication date: 24-Jun-2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/ICCCNT61001.2024.10725718

Index Terms

Leveraging Social Media to Buy Fake Reviews

Recommendations

Exploiting social media for fake reviews: evidence from Amazon and Facebook

We provide an overview of our recent work that studies the market for fake product reviews on Amazon.com where reviews are purchased in large private internet groups on Facebook and other sites. We find that a wide array of products purchase fake ...
The Market for Fake Reviews
This paper studies the market for fake product reviews on Amazon.com.
We study the market for fake product reviews on Amazon.com. Reviews are purchased in large private groups on Facebook and other sites. We hand-collect data on these markets and then collect a panel of data on these products’ ratings and reviews on Amazon, ...
The Market for Fake Reviews
EC '21: Proceedings of the 22nd ACM Conference on Economics and Computation

We study the market for fake product reviews on Amazon.com. These reviews are purchased in large private internet groups on Facebook and other sites. We hand-collect data on these markets to characterize the types of products that buy fake reviews and ...

Comments

Please enable JavaScript to view thecomments powered by Disqus.

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

Communications of the ACM Volume 66, Issue 10

October 2023

110 pages

ISSN:0001-0782

EISSN:1557-7317

DOI:10.1145/3625456

Editor:
James Larus
Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY

Issue’s Table of Contents

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 22 September 2023

Published in CACM Volume 66, Issue 10

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Request Permissions

Check for updates

Qualifiers

Research-article

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

1
Total Citations
View Citations
3,266
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)2,123
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)131

Reflects downloads up to 19 Dec 2024

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

View all

Kannal NAsmathunnisa NKallimani J(2024)Impacts of Fake Reviews on Dietary Supplements and Healthcare Products in Social Media2024 15th International Conference on Computing Communication and Networking Technologies (ICCCNT)10.1109/ICCCNT61001.2024.10725718(1-4)Online publication date: 24-Jun-2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/ICCCNT61001.2024.10725718

View Options

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

PDF

eReader

View online with eReader.

eReader

Digital Edition

View this article in digital edition.

Digital Edition

Magazine Site

View this article on the magazine site (external)

Magazine Site

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Abstract

References

Cited By

Index Terms

Recommendations

Exploiting social media for fake reviews: evidence from Amazon and Facebook

The Market for Fake Reviews

The Market for Fake Reviews

Comments

Information

Published In

Publisher

Publication History

Permissions

Check for updates

Qualifiers

Contributors

Other Metrics

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

Other Metrics

Citations

Cited By

View options

PDF

eReader

Digital Edition

Magazine Site

Login options

Full Access

Figures

Other

Share

Share this Publication link

Share on social media

Affiliations