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- Title
An Empirical Study of Free Product Sampling and Rating Bias.
- Authors
Lin, Zhijie; Zhang, Ying; Tan, Yong
- Abstract
Many electronic commerce platforms and retailers have increasingly adopted free product sampling to promote products and to attract product reviews. We conjecture that consumers who receive free samples may reciprocate by giving higher ratings as a return to retailers' beneficial action, which causes rating biases. Specifically, we are interested in understanding how free sampling promotion of a product affects the product's rating and the roles of important contingent factors, including product pricing (i.e., list price and price discount) and product popularity. Analyzing data collected from Taobao.com, we find that, on average, engaging in free product sampling increases product rating by 1.1%. Moreover, the bias would be larger with higher original price but smaller with larger price discount and higher product popularity. Our findings suggest that retailers could conduct free sampling promotions to improve their product ratings, but consumers should be cautious about the possible biases in ratings, and platform operators or rating system designers should offer solutions to correct the biases. Free product sampling has increasingly become a popular promotional strategy and served as a new mechanism of product review generation in e-commerce. We empirically analyze how a product's engagement in free product sampling affects the product's review rating, and we also examine important contingent factors of product pricing and product popularity. Using a rich data set from Taobao.com and multiple identification strategies and estimation methods, we find that engaging in free product sampling increases product rating by 1.1%. We argue that it is consumers' reciprocal behavior of giving higher ratings as a return to retailers' beneficial actions that causes rating bias. We further find that the bias would be larger with higher original price but smaller with larger price discount and higher product popularity. Our empirical findings provide important contributions to the literature on product sampling and word-of-mouth and offer critical managerial implications to online retailers, rating system designers, and consumers. The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/isre.2018.0801.
- Subjects
ELECTRONIC commerce; TAOBAO.COM Inc.; PRICING; POPULARITY; CUSTOMER relations
- Publication
Information Systems Research, 2019, Vol 30, Issue 1, p260
- ISSN
1047-7047
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1287/isre.2018.0801