The Impact of Negative Reviews on Online Search and Purchase Decisions
利用一家大型在线零售商的点击流数据，研究发现负面评论会显著降低产品的购买概率，因为它与高平均评分形成对比，减少消费者继续浏览该产品信息的可能性，并增加他们查看替代产品及其评论的概率。这些效应主要适用于实用品而非享乐品，且当评论涉及产品功能或客户服务时更为明显。
Despite evidence indicating the significant influence of online reviews on purchase decisions, even after considering a product's average rating ( Vana and Lambrecht 2021 ), the underlying factors behind this effect and the broader impact of reviews on consumer decision making remain uncertain. This study uses clickstream data from a major online retailer to explore how negative reviews affect consumer search and purchase decisions. Leveraging exogenous variation created by the display of online reviews sorted by recency, the authors find that negative reviews significantly reduce a product's purchase probability because they (1) contrast with the often-high average product rating, (2) decrease the probability that consumers continue browsing for information about the focal product, (3) increase the probability of visiting the page of substitute products, and (4) increase the probability of viewing reviews about substitute products. Importantly, these effects apply to utilitarian products but not hedonic products and when reviews pertain to product functionality or customer service but not to taste-related factors. The authors estimate a product's vulnerability to negative reviews along two dimensions—purchase and search probability for substitutes—and display these effects on a two-dimensional map.