WHAT I RESEARCH
How do consumers learn about their options?
How do consumers create and express opinions about their experiences?
HOW I RESEARCH
Web scraping
Experiments
Econometric analyses
Abstracts:
User-Generated Star Ratings Are Not Inherently Comparable
With Nick Reinholtz
This paper identifies an inherent, structural problem with online ratings: Ratings are created for single alternatives in isolation, but are used to make comparisons. As a result, ratings are affected by differences in raters’ frames of reference, which are meaningless to future consumers.
Through nearly 1 million quarterly observations of 343,327 Airbnb listings, we demonstrate one consequence of this—ratings vary over time due to variation in context, not quality. We then experimentally demonstrate this structural misalignment, showing that objectively superior alternatives can receive lower ratings than inferior competitors when the superior alternative engenders higher expectations.
Quality in Context: Evidence that Consumption Context Influences User-Generated Product Ratings.
With Nick Reinholtz
Using 220,000 ratings scraped from REI.com, we find that recent unseasonably cold weather at a reviewer's location leads them to rate cold-weather gear lower than during seasonable or warm temperatures. Other product ratings are unaffected by recent temperature: For example, ratings for bicycles are not impacted by weather.
This suggests that consumers fail to attribute variation in experience to situational factors when creating ratings. In a series of experiments, we find that this influence is extremely stubborn to potential remedies.
Code, data, and materials on OSF
The OSF folder contains the Python and R code used to scrape reviews from REI, merge them with weather data, and clean them. It is a bit messy, but I hope it can be of use to someone. Please cite the working paper if you use the data or code.
Fan Sentiment Expressed in College Football Message Board Posts Predicts Game Outcomes Controlling for Betting Lines
With William Rose, Nick Reinholtz, and Donnie Lichtenstein
Sports team message boards have been likened to a “local pub”, where people come together for entertainment and community. Understandably, there is no expectation within or outside of this community that fan posts might contain information of value relative to their team’s future performance (e.g., information that would have a positive influence on a betting outcome).
Challenging this notion, we find that in over 10 million posts scraped from these message boards, fans possess a remarkable ability to gather diagnostic information about their team's prospects. The sentiment expressed in online forums dedicated to specific college football teams can predict the outcome of that team’s upcoming game, even when accounting for the established betting lines. Using cross-validation, we find that a betting strategy based on this sentiment analysis would have succeeded in winning 55%-61% of wagers placed over the period studied.
Is a (Money) Problem Shared, a Problem Halved? Investigating the Impact of Communication on Financial Anxiety
With Joe J. Gladstone and Emily N. Garbinsky
Money is a taboo subject in much of the Western world. But would encouraging consumers to more freely communicate about their money issues improve how they feel about their finances? We hypothesized that when people more frequently discuss and share their financial problems they will experience a reduction in the anxiety they feels towards their finances. We support this hypothesis using multiple data sources, including the application of automated textual analysis on posts scraped from two online forums (N = 343,786 and 561,061), two surveys (N = 101,844 and 711), and a longitudinal diary study (N = 533, Nobs = 2,519) where we experimentally manipulate how participants communicate about money. Results indicate that talking about money benefits consumers by reducing feelings of stress and anxiety towards their finances. The diary study explores potential process explanations, such as the impact of receiving amounts of specific advice and/or emotional support from communications partners. Supplementary analyses find preliminary evidence for a moderating role for financial hardship, with those in greatest hardship benefiting most from talking about their finances.