Manipulation Through Biased Product Reviews*
研究企业如何通过操纵产品评论来影响消费者，发现两种类型的企业都会投入努力操纵评论，且在某些情况下能增加销量，高质企业的操纵甚至可能提升消费者福利。
We study a signal‐jamming model of product review manipulation in which rational consumers consult product reviews and price to better estimate a product's quality, and a firm, whose quality is either high or low, chooses its price and how much bias to insert into product reviews. We show that both firm types always exert positive effort to manipulate product reviews, and, depending on the equilibrium price level, one or both of them can increase its sales. When the high‐type firm exerts more effort than the low‐type, review manipulation benefits consumers by raising [lowering] their demand for the high‐quality [low‐quality] product.