This paper takes stock of recent developments related to online consumer ratings and reviews and their effects on consumer behaviour. It provides an overview of key consumer benefits and risks associated with user-generated feedback, and identifies consumer policy challenges, including...

Online product reviews constitute a powerful source of information for consumers. Past research has studied the effect of aggregate measures of reviews (such as, average product rating and number of reviews) on consumer behaviour. In this study, we investigate how individual reviews displayed on...

Information problems in health care and the multifaceted nature of hospital quality complicate hospital choice. Online reviews provide an accessible, salient means through which researchers and health care decision-makers can gather information about a hospital's quality of care, and given their...

We test the impact of online hotel ratings on the customers' hotel choice using a binary choice experiment where the online rating score is one of the hotels' attributes. Results show that online rating scores have a positive and significant impact on hotel choice. We also calculate the...

Tourist taxes represent one of the principal sources of revenue for a number of local authorities. Using a dataset of more than 300 thousands reviews on TripAdvisor, we analyze the effect of tourist taxes on online ratings posted by hotel costumers. Online ratings are strategic variables for the...