Professor: Consumers benefit from gamed forums

Posted by: Stephen Baker on November 17

Say you’re shopping for a car and you go to an online forum. There you read the “experiences” of some “consumers,” who in fact are paid shills for the car companies. Is that a good thing?

U of Maryland business professor Chris Dellarocas makes a case that it is. Dellarocas tells me that companies whose products fare well in these forums will be the most likely to jump in. The result is that they will amplify the positive message, making it easier for readers to get the “truth.” Unpopular companies, he says, will find it much harder to reverse the flow of popular opinion, and will be less likely to try. If we boil it down to extremes, his optimistic message: It’s cheap and effective to tell the truth in public forums, and not worth the effort to lie. (If you’re mathematically inclined, some of his analysis is here. And here’s an abstract for his new paper, published in Management Science.)

My feeling is that the most credible contributors on these forums are those who appear to give balanced and nuanced opinions. They validate the other side. Let’s say a cell phone is getting rotten reviews on the forums. A paid poster will be credible only if he admits that yes, the interface is a mess and the thing feels like a boulder in your pocket…But the voice quality is terrific and the battery lasts forever. So I think next time he crunches his numbers, Prof. Dellarocas should look at scenarios in which the “bad” companies tell half-truths, not lies.

Meantime, we should all visit these forums and drown out the paid shills with our honest, real-life reviews. On second thought, you do it. I’m a little busy today.