User ratings are often a good way to make choices about a purchase, but they come with some inherent weaknesses. For a start, they suffer badly from sampling bias: the kind of person who writes a review isn’t necessarily a good representative of all people who bought the product. Review-writers are likely to be people who have had either a very positive or very negative response to a product. And often, only a few people rate a particular product. Like an experiment with a small sample size, this makes the average rating less reliable.
It turns out people are pretty bad at taking these weaknesses into account when they assess online product ratings, according to a recent paper in the Journal of Consumer Research. The authors found that Amazon ratings might not be the best way to predict the quality of a product, and these reviews often include more subjective judgments that don't get taken into account by potential buyers.
To assess the quality of user ratings, the researchers used ratings from Consumer Reports (CR), a user-supported organization that buys products and tests them rigorously before assigning a score. Generally, CR is considered a reasonable approximation of objective quality within a few different academic fields. To test the reliability, the researchers took CR scores for 1,272 products and compared them to more than 300,000 Amazon ratings for the same items.
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