Consumer Review Sites: Are they doomed to faulty review and product combinations?
The emergence of online review sites such as Angie’s List and Yelp has created an abundance of information that is available to consumers. Purchasers of consumer products and services are able to review their experiences about the transaction so that others may develop a more informed decision about their own preferences. The issue with many of these online review sites, however, is that the credibility of the reviewer is not immediately apparent to the users of the information. This leads to much skepticism about the industry, as consumers are uncertain whether the review is a figment of a firm’s marketing scheme or someone’s genuine feedback about a transaction. As a result, many of the firms providing review services have been struggling in the financial markets, as investors are uncertain about the companies’ abilities to provide long-term value to consumers and shareholders. If we look at the situation from the perspective of link analysis, however, it appears that there may be a way to remediate some of the issues that arise from faulty reviews not connecting to the best products and services.
Link analysis focuses on the connection between hubs and authorities in a manner that yields the best combination of outcomes. In this scenario, the hubs are the reviewers of products and services and the authorities are the actual products and services. As a consumer, you are interested in the reviews that lead to the best opportunities to find objects aligned with your preferences. Thus, it is important to establish both the reviewers that are good and the reviewed products that are good. To think about how this would function, we would want to think about people searching for a particular product. When a number of helpful reviews are given to a product, the product receives a certain kind of collective endorsement. This would lead people to believe that this product should be ranked first on those apps. It is important to consider, however, the functionality and credibility of the reviewers that are evaluating those products and services. A reviewer that provides a lot of good reviews across a lot of products would be important to prioritize when people are sifting through the applications. Thus, in link analysis you would want to find the cross-section between these good reviewers and good products. We say that an authority, or product, is good if a lot of credible reviews point to it. We say that a hub, or a reviewer, is good if it points to a lot of good authorities. Thus you would want to establish the optimal balance between the two.
There are multiple steps to analyzing good hubs and authorities. The first is to rank the products by the number of hubs, or reviewers, that point to it. Obviously, a higher score would reflect a better product. However, you would then want to analyze the credibility of the reviewers. To do so, you would sum the counts of all the products it points to. The intuition here is that a good reviewer will have also reviewed a lot of good products. Although the analysis may seem complete, we do not stop here. We would then go back and forth between the reviewers and products by reweighting the scores based upon the counts of the opposite items that point to them. As you progress through several iterations, it will start to become clear which products are receiving good reviews and the reviewers that are giving them, as you start to see the separation in scores between the products and reviewers.
Taking this analysis in context of the initial problem proposed by Bloomberg, these review services should focus on tailoring their search functions such that the reviewers and products that are most closely and heavily linked are provided to the users. In this manner, the number of company influenced reviews would be downplayed and genuine user reviews who are providing their recommendations across a variety of far stretching products would be amplified. This would help promote confidence among users as well as their investors, providing a more sustainable business model and value proposition for all.
Sources:
Article: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-12-23/the-trouble-with-online-customer-reviews
Image: Google images via http://parkbench.com/blog/hook-your-business-on-review-websites-with-4-simple-steps