Discussion of 'The Market for Reviews: Strategic Behavior of Online Product Reviewers with Monetary Incentives'

摘要

In this note, I discuss the article of Dorner et al. who experimentally study the issue of generating high-quality online product reviews under two different incentive schemes. I first classify their work in the existing literature on marketing and information systems and highlight their contribution. I then argue that the existence of cognitive dissonance costs serve as a reasonable explanatory factor for their main results. Two further critical issues warn against the limited generalizability of the present study to the real review market and ability to provide practical implications.