Expert Opinion and the Demand for Experience Goods: An Experimental Approach
通过零售连锁店的随机实验，研究专家意见对葡萄酒需求的影响，发现只有高评分葡萄酒需求增加，且消费者主要利用质量信息而非仅知晓产品存在。
There exist two significant obstacles to analyzing the effect of expert opinion on consumer demand for experience goods: (1) the relationship between good reviews and high product demand may be spurious and driven by high product quality, and (2) even if expert opinion increases consumer demand, it is unclear whether it does so by providing quality information or by alerting consumers to the existence of a particular product. We utilize an experimental approach in a retail grocery chain in which we display expert opinion information for a group of randomly selected wines to overcome these obstacles. We find that although there is no overall consumer response to expert opinion provision, a subset of highly reviewed wines experienced an increase in demand. Results indicate that consumers utilize quality information provided by expert opinion labels, as opposed to solely using the label to learn of a wine's existence.