Rating deviation and manipulated reviews on the Internet—A multi-method study

Abstract

Manipulated reviews can mislead consumers to make inappropriate purchase decisions and reduce consumers’ dependency on online reviews, jeopardizing the platforms’ reputation. Existing studies mainly focus on the detection and the impact of manipulated reviews but are limited in examining the determinants of review legitimacy from the perspective of consumer perception. The current research introduces perceived review manipulation, defined as the extent to which an individual perceives a review as non-authentic with the goal of misleading others and influencing product sales. Using psychological reactance theory as a general framework, we investigate the impact of reviews with deviation from the average ratings on perceived review manipulation and review adoption. We future examine two boundary conditions of the above relationship—the moderating effects of review content concreteness and reviewer rating distribution. We adopt a multi-method approach to the empirical test of the research model. First, three online randomized experiments reveal that: (1) reviews with deviant ratings are more likely to be perceived as manipulated; (2) the relationship in (1) is enhanced when review content is abstract rather than concrete and when a reviewer is usually negative/positive (i.e., his/her rating distribution has positive/negative skewness) based on the deviation direction; and (3) perceived review manipulation negatively influences review adoption. Second, a field study was conducted to support the external validity of our research model. Our findings have academic and practical implications.