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Should We Reach for the Stars? Examining the Convergence Between Online Product Ratings and Objective Product Quality and Their Impacts on Sales Performance

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Sarah Köcher at Kiel University
Sarah Köcher
Sören Köcher at TU Dortmund University
Sören Köcher
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By documenting that online ratings poorly correlate with quality scores provided by Consumer Reports—presumably a measure of ‘objective’ product quality—de Langhe et al. (2016a) found that consumers rely more heavily on such ratings when making quality inferences than they should. Aside from replicating this finding, we examine the moderating effect of product age on the convergence between objective and rated quality and investigate which quality indicator is a better predictor of sales performance.
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