Online reviews have diffused into a large variety of businesses, ranging from physical goods to services. The ubiquity of the reviews and the importance given to them by potential customers makes examining their validity extremely important. While good reviews can boost companies’ business, bad reviews can spell their doom. Since online reviews are anonymous, there are cases of both false advertising and slander that can create conflict. In this paper authors provide reasons for online rating bias and demonstrate a way to measure it. Authors mine consumer’s location aware tweets from business locations to capture a location’s pleasure score and compare the pleasure scores to Yelp ratings to determine how overrated or underrated the venue is. Foursquare and Twitter are mined to extract an emotion score from the location aware tweets using a dictionary called the Affective Norms for English Words (ANEW). Rating biases are found across cities and different types of restaurants and managerial and policy implications discussed.

Introduction

۲۰۱۳ was witness to the conclusion of a year-long undercover investigation called “Operation Clean Turf” after which 19 companies in New York agreed to stop posting false online reviews for businesses and paid more than $350,000 in fines and penalties (Schneiderman, 2013). The incident brought to light the business of false consumer reviews, which affects consumer expectations and business reputations. Today the large majority of consumers read review websites before making purchase decisions, whether it be for buying a product or a service. Similarly, every organization that sells to or serves a consumer, expects to be reviewed online. Good reviews have become points of pride for businesses and are often displayed as badges similar to marks of honor. Hotels and restaurants that are rated highly by travel site “Tripadvisor” or “Yelp” proudly put a sticker outside their business locations demonstrating their popularity. These websites also give out free stickers to businesses which convince first time customers of the trustworthiness of a business, and encourage them to try out a new place. The rating score and sticker thus serve as a seal of approval, a symbol of trust and reliability. The growth of review sites has also fueled multiple controversies.