Understanding the Impact of Reviews on Consumer Product Choices Under Negotiated Pricing
研究了在议价场景中，在线评论如何通过影响消费者偏好和议价能力来改变需求，发现评论中的折扣信息对议价的影响比偏好更重要，并警示用折扣换好评的做法可能适得其反。
We study the impact of reviews on product choices when consumers can negotiate price. Although prior research has examined the impact of reviews in various contexts, none has considered a setting in which the purchase price is negotiated. We postulate that online reviews affect demand through consumer baseline product preference and consumer bargaining power. Leveraging a unique data set of consumer reviews of new car purchases, we developed and estimated a structural model to decompose and quantify the two mechanisms of how reviews affect demand: baseline preference mechanism versus bargaining power mechanism. Our counterfactual analysis suggests that the bargaining power mechanism is more important than the baseline preference mechanism in explaining how historical price and discount frequency information in reviews affect seller profits. Ignoring the impact of reviews on the negotiated price leads to a biased estimation of the effectiveness of reviews. We call into caution a popular selling practice of using discounts in exchange for positive reviews, as it can backfire when future consumers leverage this discount information to negotiate a lower price. This paper was accepted by Kartik Hosanagar, information systems. Supplemental Material: The online appendix and data files are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2020.02658 .