Source Neglect in Online Reviews
(A2026-134247)

AUTHORS

Katie Spangenberg, Seattle University; Mathew Isaac, Seattle University; Nevena Koukova, Lehigh University; Rebecca Jen-Hui Wang, Lehigh University

ABSTRACT

Although most online reviews are collected by dedicated review sites (e.g., Yelp, TripAdvisor) or retail marketplaces (e.g., Amazon, eBay), there has recently been an uptick in brand-sourced reviews that are captured by the reviewed brand itself. Across three real-world datasets spanning the healthcare, beauty, and retail sectors, this research first establishes that customer ratings for the same product or provider tend to be higher for brand-sourced reviews than for reviews sourced by third-party platforms. However, four controlled experiments indicate that consumers tend to inadequately account for these differences when evaluating offerings and making purchase decisions, a phenomenon the authors refer to as source neglect. These experiments also show that designing simple interventions to highlight the existence of multiple review sources can attenuate source neglect by leading consumers to infer that brand-sourced reviews are less credible.