Do Online Reviews ReflEct a Product’s True Perceived Quality? an Investigation of Online Movie Reviews Across Cultures

Electronic Commerce Research and Applications 9 (2010) 374–385

Contents lists available at ScienceDirect

Electronic Commerce Research and Applications

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/ecra

Do online reviews reflect a product’s true perceived quality? An investigation

of online movie reviews across cultures

Noi Sian Koh a,*, Nan Hu a, Eric K. Clemons b

a

b

Singapore Management University, 80 Stamford Road, Singapore 178902, Singapore

The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, 3730 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA 19104-6340, United States

a r t i c l e

i n f o

Article history:

Received 8 February 2010

Accepted 3 April 2010

Available online 13 April 2010

Keywords:

Online reviews

Movie ratings

Cross-cultural comparisons

Under-reporting bias

a b s t r a c t

This paper investigates when the reported average of online ratings matches the perceived average assessment of the population as a whole, including the average assessments of both raters and non-raters. We

apply behavioral theory to capture intentions in rating online movie reviews in two dissimilar countries –

China and the United States. We argue that consumers’ rating behaviors are affected by cultural influences and that they are influenced in predictable ways. Based on data collected from IMDB.com and Douban.com, we found significant differences across raters from these two different cultures. Additionally,

we examined how cultural elements influence rating behavior for a hybrid culture – Singapore. To study

whether online consumer reviews are subjected to under-reporting bias, which is, consumers with

extreme opinions are more likely to report their opinions than consumers with moderate reviews causing

online reviews to be a biased estimator of a product’s true quality, we compare the consumer reviews

posted online with those from an experimental study. Our results shows that under-reporting is more

prevalent among US online network, thus online...