[go: up one dir, main page]
More Web Proxy on the site http://driver.im/
IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/oup/econjl/v134y2024i663p2712-2745..html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Finding the Wise and the Wisdom in a Crowd: Estimating Underlying Qualities of Reviewers and Items

Author

Listed:
  • Nicolas Carayol
  • Matthew O Jackson
Abstract
Consumers, businesses and organisations rely on others’ ratings of items when making choices. However, individual reviewers vary in their accuracy and some are biased—either systematically over- or under-rating items relative to others’ tastes, or even deliberately distorting a rating. We describe how to process ratings by a group of reviewers over a set of items and evaluate the individual reviewers’ accuracies and biases, in a way that yields unbiased and consistent estimates of the items’ true qualities. We provide Monte Carlo simulations that showcase the added value of our technique even with small data sets, and we show that this improvement increases as the number of items increases. Revisiting the famous 1976 wine tasting that compared Californian and Bordeaux wines, accounting for the substantial variation in reviewers’ biases and accuracies results in a ranking that differs from the original average rating. We also illustrate the power of this methodology with an application to more than 45,000 ratings of ‘en primeur’ Bordeaux fine wines by expert critics. Those data show that our estimated wine qualities significantly predict prices when controlling for prominent experts’ ratings and numerous fixed effects. We also find that the elasticity of a wine price in an expert’s ratings increases with that expert’s accuracy.

Suggested Citation

  • Nicolas Carayol & Matthew O Jackson, 2024. "Finding the Wise and the Wisdom in a Crowd: Estimating Underlying Qualities of Reviewers and Items," The Economic Journal, Royal Economic Society, vol. 134(663), pages 2712-2745.
    • Handle: RePEc:oup:econjl:v:134:y:2024:i:663:p:2712-2745.
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/ej/ueae045
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to look for a different version below or search for a different version of it.

    Other versions of this item:

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:oup:econjl:v:134:y:2024:i:663:p:2712-2745.. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Oxford University Press or the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/resssea.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.