Imperial College London
Alternate

Professor Kalyan Talluri

Business School

Professor of Analytics and Operations
 
 
 
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Contact

 

kalyan.talluri Website CV

 
 
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Location

 

387ABusiness School BuildingSouth Kensington Campus

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Summary

 

Publications

Citation

BibTex format

@article{Chen:2021:10.1287/mnsc.2020.3892,
author = {Chen, N and Li, A and Talluri, K},
doi = {10.1287/mnsc.2020.3892},
journal = {Management Science},
pages = {7472--7492},
title = {Reviews and self-selection bias with operational implications},
url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2020.3892},
volume = {67},
year = {2021}
}
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RIS format (EndNote, RefMan)

TY  - JOUR
AB  - Reviews for products and services written by previous consumers have become an influential input to the purchase decision of customers. Many service businesses monitor the reviews closely for feedback as well as detecting service flaws, and they have become part of the performance review for service managers with rewards tied to improvement in the aggregate rating. Many empirical papers have documented a bias in the aggregate ratings, arising because of customers’ inherent self-selection in their choices and bounded rationality in evaluating previous reviews. Although there is a vast empirical literature analyzing reviews, theoretical models that try to isolate and explain the bias in ratings are relatively few. Assuming consumers simply substitute the average rating that they see as a proxy for quality, we give a precise characterization of the self-selection bias on ratings of an assortment of products when consumers confound ex ante innate preferences for a product or service with ex post experience and service quality and do not separate the two. We develop a parsimonious choice model for consumer purchase decisions and show that the mechanism leads to an upward bias, which is more pronounced for niche products. Based on our theoretical characterization, we study the effect on pricing and assortment decisions of the firm when potential customers purchase based on the biased ratings. Our results give insights into how quality, prices, and customer feedback are intricately tied together for service firms.
AU  - Chen,N
AU  - Li,A
AU  - Talluri,K
DO  - 10.1287/mnsc.2020.3892
EP  - 7492
PY  - 2021///
SN  - 0025-1909
SP  - 7472
TI  - Reviews and self-selection bias with operational implications
T2  - Management Science
UR  - http://dx.doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2020.3892
UR  - http://hdl.handle.net/10044/1/79572
VL  - 67
ER  -
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