Abstract
Recently, local business-review websites have gained popularity, but the problem of fraud has become more and more severe. We did research based on the biggest Chinese local business-review website: Dazhongdianping. We collected 792,364 reviews of every registered restaurant on the Dazhongdianping website in Hangzhou, and our findings include:1. Compared with US businesses Luca and Zervas (2016) who give both unfavorable reviews to their competitors and favorable reviews to their own business, Chinese businesses focus only on the latter, perhaps because of the differences in business ethics between the two countries.2. Review frauds have a close relationship with the user’s social network. Users with many followers and higher interaction scores are always more powerful than other users, and they also have reasonable incentives to commit fraud. We found that these users are more likely to post fake reviews.3. Finer restaurants are less likely to commit review fraud.
Highlights
W ith the rapid development of local business-review websites, more and more consumers began to search for a business review before making an actual visit
Currently the algorithm still needs to be improved, and it is necessary to help website users keep clear of these fake reviews
Our research studied the incentives of business review fraud and found that Chinese businesses focus on favorable review fraud more than on unfavorable review fraud, whereas US business owners may commit both favorable review fraud or carry on unfavorable reviews, Chinese business owners have more motivation to improve their own star ratings, probably because of the intentions of the website users
Summary
W ith the rapid development of local business-review websites, more and more consumers began to search for a business review before making an actual visit. If customers were unwilling to leave reviews for these newcomers of products/brands, Amazon.com allowed the business to distribute coupons to their customers in order to inspire the customers to write reviews These reviews gradually turned to “bribe reviews,” in that people who received coupons or discounts clearly give higher grades and use more favorable words in their reviews. The posters attach photos to them and write very detailed information (because of least length requirements by the business), and sometimes those fake ones seem to be even better than a legitimate review These phenomena made us wonder what might be the reasons for businesses to commit fraud; we carried out research on the biggest Chinese business-review website: Dazhongdianping
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