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Is silence golden? An inquiry into the meaning of silence in professional product evaluations

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  • Wagner Kamakura
  • Suman Basuroy
  • Peter Boatwright

Abstract

The world today is rife with product recommendations from professional critics and experts that are available from numerous sources—television, magazines, radio, internet, etc. Very often these recommendations shape our decisions and choices. In this study, we investigate two main issues regarding expert opinions. First, we present an approach that uses information available from every expert, including those who are silent about the product, to obtain a consensus measure of expert opinion. Our model also allows us to obtain a measure of how informative each expert is and how their information content may vary by type of review. More importantly, our overall measure of expert opinion weights the opinion of each expert based on how informative they are at the particular quality level of the product being evaluated. In other words, we provide consumers with a method that reconciles conflicting expert opinions into a summary measure. The second issue we investigate in this paper is the meaning of “silence” in expert opinions. Our model demonstrates that the fact that an expert is silent about a product may imply a positive or a negative review, depending on the expert. We use data from the motion pictures industry to illustrate our approach. Copyright Springer Science + Business Media, LLC 2006

Suggested Citation

  • Wagner Kamakura & Suman Basuroy & Peter Boatwright, 2006. "Is silence golden? An inquiry into the meaning of silence in professional product evaluations," Quantitative Marketing and Economics (QME), Springer, vol. 4(2), pages 119-141, June.
    • Handle: RePEc:kap:qmktec:v:4:y:2006:i:2:p:119-141
    DOI: 10.1007/s11129-006-3181-x
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    1. Harvey, Nigel & Harries, Clare & Fischer, Ilan, 2000. "Using Advice and Assessing Its Quality," Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, Elsevier, vol. 81(2), pages 252-273, March.
    2. Michel Wedel & Wagner Kamakura, 2001. "Factor analysis with (mixed) observed and latent variables in the exponential family," Psychometrika, Springer;The Psychometric Society, vol. 66(4), pages 515-530, December.
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    4. Holbrook, Morris B, 1999. "Popular Appeal versus Expert Judgments of Motion Pictures," Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Consumer Research Inc., vol. 26(2), pages 144-155, September.
    5. West, Patricia M & Broniarczyk, Susan M, 1998. "Integrating Multiple Opinions: The Role of Aspiration Level on Consumer Response to Critic Consensus," Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Consumer Research Inc., vol. 25(1), pages 38-51, June.
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    Cited by:

    1. Angela (Xia) Liu & Tridib Mazumdar & Bo Li, 2015. "Counterfactual Decomposition of Movie Star Effects with Star Selection," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 61(7), pages 1704-1721, July.
    2. Thaís L. D. Souza & Marislei Nishijima & Ana C. P. Fava, 2019. "Do consumer and expert reviews affect the length of time a film is kept on screens in the USA?," Journal of Cultural Economics, Springer;The Association for Cultural Economics International, vol. 43(1), pages 145-171, March.
    3. Jun Pang & Angela Xia Liu & Peter N. Golder, 2022. "Critics’ conformity to consumers in movie evaluation," Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, Springer, vol. 50(4), pages 864-887, July.
    4. Clement, Michel & Wu, Steven & Fischer, Marc, 2014. "Empirical generalizations of demand and supply dynamics for movies," International Journal of Research in Marketing, Elsevier, vol. 31(2), pages 207-223.
    5. Morris Holbrook & Michela Addis, 2008. "Art versus commerce in the movie industry: a Two-Path Model of Motion-Picture Success," Journal of Cultural Economics, Springer;The Association for Cultural Economics International, vol. 32(2), pages 87-107, June.
    6. Marina Sokolova & Guy Lapalme, 2012. "How Much Do We Say? Using Informativeness of Negotiation Text Records for Early Prediction of Negotiation Outcomes," Group Decision and Negotiation, Springer, vol. 21(3), pages 363-379, May.
    7. Fowdur, Lona & Kadiyali, Vrinda & Prince, Jeffrey, 2012. "Racial bias in expert quality assessment: A study of newspaper movie reviews," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 84(1), pages 292-307.
    8. Dehling, Noémie, 2023. "Silence in the consumer experience: A conceptualization and research agenda," Journal of Business Research, Elsevier, vol. 165(C).
    9. Moon, Sangkil & Kamakura, Wagner A., 2017. "A picture is worth a thousand words: Translating product reviews into a product positioning map," International Journal of Research in Marketing, Elsevier, vol. 34(1), pages 265-285.
    10. Peter Boatwright & Suman Basuroy & Wagner Kamakura, 2007. "Reviewing the reviewers: The impact of individual film critics on box office performance," Quantitative Marketing and Economics (QME), Springer, vol. 5(4), pages 401-425, December.
    11. Marco Caliendo & Michel Clement & Edlira Shehu, 2015. "The effect of individual professional critics on books’ sales: capturing selection biases from observable and unobservable factors," Marketing Letters, Springer, vol. 26(4), pages 423-436, December.
    12. Hofmann, Julian & Clement, Michel & Völckner, Franziska & Hennig-Thurau, Thorsten, 2017. "Empirical generalizations on the impact of stars on the economic success of movies," International Journal of Research in Marketing, Elsevier, vol. 34(2), pages 442-461.
    13. Michel Clement & Anke Hille & Bernd Lucke & Christina Schmidt-Stölting & Frank Sambeth, 2008. "Der Einfluss von Rankings auf den Absatz — Eine empirische Analyse der Wirkung von Bestsellerlisten und Rangpositionen auf den Erfolg von Büchern," Schmalenbach Journal of Business Research, Springer, vol. 60(8), pages 746-777, December.
    14. Jia Jin & Chenchen Lin & Fenghua Wang & Ting Xu & Wuke Zhang, 2023. "A study of cognitive effort involved in the framing effect of summary descriptions of online product reviews for search vs. experience products," Electronic Commerce Research, Springer, vol. 23(2), pages 785-806, June.
    15. Natalia Gmerek, 2015. "The determinants of Polish movies’ box office performance in Poland," Journal of Marketing and Consumer Behaviour in Emerging Markets, University of Warsaw, Faculty of Management, vol. 1(1), pages 15-35.
    16. Nima Jalali & Sangkil Moon & Moon-Yong Kim, 2023. "Profiling diverse reviewer segments using online reviews of service industries," Journal of Marketing Analytics, Palgrave Macmillan, vol. 11(2), pages 130-148, June.

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