Evaluating the Usefulness of Online Reviews

When consumers purchase a product online, they often rely on review comments or recommendations about the product since they cannot examine the product directly. However, review quality varies widely from reviewer to reviewer, and not all reviews are reliable. This paper reports the results of an experiment that examines the relationship between the average review score and the number of items for resale, i.e., products that have been already bought and used by the consumers and placed back in the market, as an estimate of product quality. The evaluation of the review is realized without considering review comments by focus on difference between "average review scores" and "modified average review scores." This result shows a feature of social media, that is, "only good things are chosen".