Understanding online product ratings: A customer satisfaction model
Affiliation:
1. Kohl''s Professor of Retail Marketing, Northern Illinois University, College of Business, DeKalb, IL 60115 USA;2. QUT Business School, Advertising, Marketing and Public Relations, Brisbane, Australia;1. Department of Marketing, College of Business and Administration, Southern Illinois University Carbondale, Rehn Hall Building, Carbondale, IL 62901, USA;2. Department of Marketing, Graduate School, Universidad Rafael Belloso Chacín, Edificio URBE, Avenida Circunvalación 2, 4005, Maracaibo, Venezuela;2. School of Management, Fudan University, Shanghai 200433, China;1. Center for Consumer Marketing, Stockholm School of Economics, Sweden;2. Roskilde University, Denmark
Abstract:
Online product ratings have become a major information source for customers, retailers, and manufacturers. Both practitioners and researchers predominantly interpret them as a reflection of product quality. We argue that they in fact represent the customer's satisfaction with the product. Accordingly, we present a customer satisfaction model of online product ratings which incorporates the customer's pre-purchase expectations and actual product performance as determinants of ratings. We validate our model by applying it to two datasets collected at the German website of Amazon.com. The results indicate that both factors have a significant influence on online product ratings, supporting the proposed interpretation of ratings.
