VOCAL MINORITY AND SILENT MAJORITY: HOW DO ONLINE RATINGS REFLECT POPULATION PERCEPTIONS OF QUALITY
VOCAL MINORITY AND SILENT MAJORITY: HOW DO ONLINE RATINGS REFLECT POPULATION PERCEPTIONS OF QUALITY
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DOI：
10.25300/misq/2015/39.3.03
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发表时间：
2015-09-01
期刊：
影响因子：
7.3
通讯作者：
McCullough, Jeffrey S.
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Gao, Guodong (Gordon);Greenwood, Brad N.;McCullough, Jeffrey S.
消费者产生的评级通常有一个共同的目标，即为其他买家说明产品或服务的质量。虽然评级在互联网上变得无处不在且具有影响力，但令人惊讶的是，很少有实证研究调查这些在线评估如何反映大众的意见，特别是在专业服务领域，消费者往往对质量不透明。在口碑文献的基础上，我们研究了在线评分与人们对医生质量的看法之间的关系。我们利用了一个独特的数据集，其中包括线下人群对医生质量的看法和消费者生成的在线评论的直接测量。因此，我们能够检查在线评分如何反映患者对医生质量的看法。与医疗从业者广泛表达的担忧形成鲜明对比的是，我们发现被患者群体评价质量较低的医生不太可能在网上被评价。尽管在线提供的评分与患者群体意见呈正相关，但在线评分往往在质量谱的上端被夸大。本研究首次提供了在线评分与潜在消费者感知质量之间关系的实证证据，并将先前对在线口碑的研究扩展到专业服务领域。
Consumer-generated ratings typically share an objective of illuminating the quality of a product or service for other buyers. While ratings have become ubiquitous and influential on the Internet, surprisingly little empirical research has investigated how these online assessments reflect the opinion of the population at large, especially in the domain of professional services where quality is often opaque to consumers. Building on the word-of-mouth literature, we examine the relationship between online ratings and population perceptions of physician quality. We leverage a unique dataset which includes direct measures of both the offline population's perception of physician quality and consumer-generated online reviews. As a result, we are able to examine how online ratings reflect patients' opinions about physician quality. In sharp contrast to the widely voiced concerns by medical practitioners, we find that physicians who are rated lower in quality by the patient population are less likely to be rated online. Although ratings provided online are positively correlated with patient population opinions, the online ratings tend to be exaggerated at the upper end of the quality spectrum. This study is the first to provide empirical evidence of the relationship between online ratings and the underlying consumer-perceived quality, and extends prior research on online word-of-mouth to the domain of professional services.