Abstract

Purpose - The purpose of this research is to discover whether the presence of the product average rating introduces biases or change the way people perceive information. We posit that review's overall rating has a predisposition effect on consumers' perception towards detailed review information. Research design, data, and methodology - To test these hypotheses, we conducted an empirical study on a real-world setting of online shopping platform. We choose the Amazon website to test our results. The data we use were collected by the Stanford Network Analysis Project1 (McAuley et al., 2013). Results - With a dataset containing reviews of seven product categories from amazon.com., our findings could possess more generalizability as they are produced on the typical and influential online market. Second, as our research provides alternative views of consumers' shopping behavior, it is better to test our hypotheses by data from the same source. Conclusions - Our study reveals the impact of the collective rating presence on consumers' diagnosticity perception and sheds light upon some of the conflictive results in prior studies. Our research generates implications to both theories and business practices, and suggests future directions for the research question.