HOW DO INCENTIVES AFFECT CONSUMER REVIEWS AND CAN WE LEARN TO RECOGNIZE INCENTIVIZED AND FAKE REVIEWS?

Consumer reviews can be found on many e-commerce and travel websites, social media platforms, and entertainment pages. They have been shown to play a crucial role in consumers’ purchase decision making and in product positioning on the page. Therefore, companies started motivating consumers to write reviews by providing various types of incentives (e.g., free product samples, loyalty points, and monetary compensation), yet there has been little research on the process of review generation or review perception depending on the different levels of review incentives. Previous research has shown that providing incentives (extrinsic motivation) can affect people’s intrinsic motivation, including the effort invested in the motivated behavior and performance. In the context of reviews, extrinsic motivation in the form of an incentive may affect review quality and bias presented opinions. Building on theories like the principle of reciprocity, this project aims to investigate how incentives affect reviewers’ motivations and their reviews. Furthermore, consumers often do not know that reviews they are reading may be incentivized (financially or otherwise). While, per regulations, incentivized reviews should be disclosed with a clear statement, the type of incentive may not be, and so-called “fake reviews” do not have any disclosures. As such, incentivized reviews can be misleading for consumers. If consumers could accurately detect incentivized and fake reviews, their impact could be reduced. Unfortunately, previous research suggests that it is difficult for consumers to accurately distinguish fake reviews. Therefore, the second aim of this project is to build on deception and persuasion knowledge theories to identify textual markers of incentivized and fake reviews and investigate whether it is possible to train consumers to recognize such reviews or at least make consumers more skeptical about them.