History Matters: The Impact of Online Customer Reviews Across Product Generations
研究了同一产品系列中，前一代产品的在线评论如何影响后一代产品的销售，发现前一代评论的正面程度会提升后一代销量，而后一代评论的正面程度反而会降低前一代销量。
We examine how online customer reviews for one generation of a product affect sales of another generation in the same product series. The main intriguing result is that previous generation valence has a positive impact on current generation sales; however, current generation valence has a negative impact on previous generation sales. The positive impact of previous generation valence becomes even stronger (1) as the uncertainty (standard deviation) in reviews for the current generation increases and (2) when the current generation valence is high. In contrast, it becomes weaker (1) as the uncertainty in reviews for the previous generation increases and (2) when the current generation has been on the market for a longer period of time. Other results are discussed. Our data consist of intergenerational pairs of point-and-shoot cameras on the largest online seller of such devices, Amazon.com. We estimate the current and previous generation models jointly, allowing for errors to be clustered at the daily and product levels. In addition, we address endogeneity concerns over the online word of mouth measures by using instrumental variables. This paper was accepted by Juanjuan Zhang, marketing.