Publications
Publications
- September 2018
- Quantitative Marketing and Economics
Aggregation of Consumer Ratings: An Application to Yelp.com
By: Weijia Dai, Ginger Jin, Jungmin Lee and Michael Luca
Abstract
Because consumer reviews leverage the wisdom of the crowd, the way in which they are aggregated is a central decision faced by platforms. We explore this "rating aggregation problem" and offer a structural approach to solving it, allowing for (1) reviewers to vary in stringency and accuracy, (2) reviewers to be influenced by existing reviews, and (3) product quality to change over time. Applying this to restaurant reviews from Yelp.com, we construct an adjusted average rating and show that even a simple algorithm can lead to large information efficiency gains relative to the arithmetic average.
Keywords
User Generated Content; Crowdsourcing; E-commerce; Yelp; Social and Collaborative Networks; Information; Internet and the Web; Learning; Mathematical Methods
Citation
Dai, Weijia, Ginger Jin, Jungmin Lee, and Michael Luca. "Aggregation of Consumer Ratings: An Application to Yelp.com." Quantitative Marketing and Economics 16, no. 3 (September 2018): 289–339.