虚假评论、消费决策与产品绩效——虚假评论能产生真实的绩效吗

Does Review Spam Create Real Performance: An Empirical Research Based on the Relationship between Review Spam, Consumption Decisions and Product Performance

本研究首先通过对虚假评论到消费感知决策这一微观动态过程的构建理论模型来提出研究假设,再设计统计模型以探究虚假评论与产品真实绩效(排除历史累积效应与当前刷单效应)之间的关联关系。研究发现,真实绩效与口碑作假嫌疑之间存在倒U型关系,即小范围的雇佣作假评论会促进真实绩效,但越过临界值之后会对绩效产生抑制作用。进一步比较临界值的位置发现,相对于淘宝商品,天猫商品有更高的作假嫌疑,但是消费者对天猫商品口碑作假的容忍度却更高。此外,相较于高信誉等级或低信誉等级的店铺,消费者对中等信誉等级店铺作假的容忍度更高。事实上,与传统口碑相比,虚假评论主要改变了在线评论的统计分布特征,降低了总评分在购买决策中的参考价值。尽管商家会面临利用虚假评论提升绩效这条捷径的诱惑,商家之间也会存在短期博弈,但是长期来看,会通过业绩惩罚回到均衡解,这意味着店铺经营者通过操纵评论获益其实是短视的。

Could the review spam produced by merchants create real product performance as they wish? By constructing a theoretical model of micro-dynamic processes from review spam to consumer-perceived decision-making, the research hypothesis is proposed, and then the statistical model is designed to explore the relationship between spam reviews and real product performance(excluding historical cumulative effects and current click-farming effects). The study found that there is an inverted U-type relationship between real performance and word-of-mouth suspicion of fraud, that is, small degree of fraud reviews will promote real-performance growth, and when it crosses the threshold, it will inhibit performance. Through the comparison of the critical value, the study found that Tmall products are more likely to be fake than Taobao products, but Consumers are more tolerant of Tmall’s reputation fraud. There is a need to distinguish between the halo effect of Tmall store and high reputation level. Tmall store is only complex when applying, which is not necessarily a high credit rating or a well-known store. But Tmall store does provide a practical shopping guarantee, which makes consumers more tolerant of manipulating comments, and many stores may take advantage of this tolerance. In addition, consumers are more tolerant of the fraud of mid-credit shop than shops with high credit ratings or low credit ratings. And in the process of consumer decision-making, the price factor takes precedence over the false suspicion of word-of-mouth, that is, when the product price exceeds a certain range, the false suspicion of word-of-mouth no longer promotes or suppresses the sales volume. In fact, compared with traditional word-of-mouth, review spam mainly changes the statistical distribution characteristics of online reviews. The policy implication of this article is that although merchants may be tempted by the shortcut of false comments, there will be short-term games between merchants(many high-credit-grade stores are also used to increase store levels by employing paid-posters at the beginning of the establishment). In long-term, this kind of merchants will get punished and come back to the equilibrium position, and there won’t be bad money to drive out good money. This means that the benefits of shop operators’ manipulation of reviews are actually short-sighted.