Published in NIM Marketing Intelligence Review
Helpful reviews are like good movies or a good novel: if you’re hooked right away, you stay and remember. No matter how short, a review tells a story in much the same way as a novel. If you want to persuade, it should start with something dramatic and sensational or the key takeaway, rather than saving the best elements for the end. Narrative eleme...
Published in NIM Marketing Intelligence Review
In a two-sided reputation system, it is in the interest of both buyers and sellers to be a good transaction partner. What sounds wonderful in theory is unfortunately not so easy to implement in reality. Reputation systems can have flaws due to factors such as reciprocity and retaliation, selective reviewing, and reputation inflation. These flaws ca...
Published in NIM Marketing Intelligence Review
In the old economy, reputation was considered an important but somewhat underestimated intangible asset. In the digital economy, the significance of reputation is expanded in scope. It enables the building of trust among “quasi-strangers” who engage in an economic transaction. Reputation scores, usually in the form of feedback, ranking and rating s...
Published in NIM Marketing Intelligence Review
What drives people’s decisions to share product and service experiences? Several studies show that a sender’s emotional arousal is a relevant factor for social sharing. Experimental studies by the Nuremberg Institute of Market Decisions (NIM) confirm that increased arousal is associated with higher levels of social sharing. The results show that th...
Published in NIM Marketing Intelligence Review
Research has documented racial or ethnic discrimination in online marketplaces, from labor markets to credit applications to housing. Platforms should therefore investigate how platform design decisions and algorithms can influence the extent of discrimination in a marketplace. By increasing awareness of this issue, managers can proactively address...
Published in NIM Marketing Intelligence Review
Hunting for “stars”, the icons of the reputation economy, is a prerequisite for survival in e-commerce in general and on sharing platforms in particular. The key to understanding the rise of reputation is trust, and the ability of a platform to provide this trust has become crucial in the past decade. Social media managers are now key players in ma...
Published in NIM Marketing Intelligence Review
Today, virtually all e-commerce and sharing-economy platforms rely on star ratings or similar systems to build trust between anonymous buyers and sellers. However, star ratings can be quite tricky as a navigation aid. Platforms and users face several challenges in making sure that reputation systems remain credible. Skewed ratings and low rating va...
Published in NIM Marketing Intelligence Review
Published in NIM Marketing Intelligence Review
While most consumers routinely read online reviews to inform their purchase decisions, the number of consumers who actively post reviews is astonishingly small. To find their way in the review jungle, readers process the information presented very selectively and pursue different objectives. They use different informational cues for their own decis...
Published in NIM Marketing Intelligence Review
The gains from crowdsourcing can be high, but so can the risks. Contests may become a nightmare for the sponsoring organization if the innovators do not behave as planned. When contest managers act in undesirable ways from a participant’s perspective, community members might bash, shame or ridicule a company. To prevent “firestorms” – negative, oft...
