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...

We leverage a temporary block of the Chinese microblogging platform Sina Weibo due to political events, to estimate the causal effect of online word-of-mouth content on product demand in the context of TV show viewership. Based on this source of exogenous variation, we estimate an elasticity of...

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...

We study the role of social engagement and advertising in building entertainment brands. We develop a structural model of viewing behaviors and apply the model to a data set on a new television program that contains both revealed preferences and self-reported preferences and expectations. We use...

Peer influence through word-of-mouth (WOM) plays an important role in many information systems but identification of causal effects is challenging. We identify causal WOM effects in the empirical setting of game adoption in a social network for gamers by exploiting differences in individuals’...