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Paper Number

1545

Paper Type

Short

Description

Online retail platforms have increasingly employed a new incentive strategy by recruiting review officers and offering monetary rewards for posting incentivized reviews. However, there may be unintended effects of such incentivized reviews on the review system. Using a weekly-product panel dataset, we bridge the causal links between the emergence of incentivized reviews and the reviewers’ subsequent posting behaviors. We show that the emergence of incentivized reviews exerts a positive impact on the reviewers’ overall subsequent contributions. However, we show detrimental effects of incentivized reviews on the subsequent regular (non-incentivized) reviews, reflected in reduced engagement, decreased quality, and usefulness. Our mechanism analyses by separating the title effect and the quality effect show that the positive effect of incentivized reviews can be explained by the observational learning of the high-quality content while the adverse effects may be attributed to the demotivation of regular reviewers in response to the incentivized officer-titles.

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20-OnlineReviews

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Dec 12th, 12:00 AM

How Does a Review Officer and Her Incentivized Contribution Affect the Review System?

Online retail platforms have increasingly employed a new incentive strategy by recruiting review officers and offering monetary rewards for posting incentivized reviews. However, there may be unintended effects of such incentivized reviews on the review system. Using a weekly-product panel dataset, we bridge the causal links between the emergence of incentivized reviews and the reviewers’ subsequent posting behaviors. We show that the emergence of incentivized reviews exerts a positive impact on the reviewers’ overall subsequent contributions. However, we show detrimental effects of incentivized reviews on the subsequent regular (non-incentivized) reviews, reflected in reduced engagement, decreased quality, and usefulness. Our mechanism analyses by separating the title effect and the quality effect show that the positive effect of incentivized reviews can be explained by the observational learning of the high-quality content while the adverse effects may be attributed to the demotivation of regular reviewers in response to the incentivized officer-titles.

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