Research Summary
Research Summary
Consumer Response to Online Ratings and Recommendations
Description
Jolie is currently conducting several laboratory and field experiments to assess the tendency of individuals to employ predictable heuristics in complex information aggregation tasks, thus leading to search and choice behavior that is suboptimal relative to the fully rational alternative. One notable finding suggests that, in some product domains, decision makers prefer options for which highly variable reviews have been given by other people. Future projects will explore the biased provision of subjective opinions by reviewers, and consequences for the weighting/integration of information by users of online recommendation systems.