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The Effect of Word of Mouth on Sales: Online Book Reviews

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Author Info
Judith A. Chevalier
Dina Mayzlin

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Abstract

We examine the effect of consumer reviews on relative sales of books on Amazon.com and BarnesandNoble.com. We find that 1) reviews are overwhelmingly positive at both sites, but there are more reviews and longer reviews at Amazon.com, 2) an improvement in a book's reviews leads to an increase in relative sales at that site, and 3) the impact of 1-star reviews is greater than the impact of 5-star reviews. The results suggest that new forms of customer communication on the Internet have an important impact on customer behavior.

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Paper provided by National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc in its series NBER Working Papers with number 10148.

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Date of creation: Dec 2003
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Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:10148

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L1 - Industrial Organization - - Market Structure, Firm Strategy, and Market Performance
L8 - Industrial Organization - - Industry Studies: Services

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References listed on IDEAS
Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
  1. Christopher Avery & Paul Resnick & Richard Zeckhauser, 1999. "The Market for Evaluations," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 89(3), pages 564-584, June. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
  2. Karen Clay & Ramayya Krishnan & Eric Wolff, 2001. "Prices and Price Dispersion on the Web: Evidence from the Online Book Industry," NBER Working Papers 8271, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
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  3. Foster, Andrew D & Rosenzweig, Mark R, 1995. "Learning by Doing and Learning from Others: Human Capital and Technical Change in Agriculture," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 103(6), pages 1176-1209, December. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
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  4. Austan Goolsbee & Judith Chevalier, 2002. "Measuring Prices and Price Competition Online: Amazon and Barnes and Noble," NBER Working Papers 9085, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
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  5. Ellison, Glenn & Fudenberg, Drew, 1995. "Word-of-Mouth Communication and Social Learning," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, MIT Press, vol. 110(1), pages 93-125, February. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
  6. Michael Smith & Erik Brynjolfsson, 1999. "Frictionless Commerce? A Comparison of Internet and Conventional Retailers," Computing in Economics and Finance 1999 1022, Society for Computational Economics.
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(explanations, Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.)

  1. Tucker, Catherine & Zhang, Juanjuan, 2007. "Long Tail or Steep Tail? A Field Investigation into How Online Popularity Information Affects the Distribution of Customer Choices," Working papers 39811, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Sloan School of Management. [Downloadable!]
  2. Jonathan Beck, 2006. "The Sales Effect of Word of Mouth: A Model for Creative Goods and Estimates for Novels," CIG Working Papers SP II 2006-16, Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin (WZB), Research Unit: Competition and Innovation (CIG). [Downloadable!]
    Other versions:
  3. Alexia Gaudeul, 2008. "Software Marketing on the Internet: the Use of Samples and Repositories," Working Papers 08-23, Centre for Competition Policy, University of East Anglia. [Downloadable!]
  4. Caroline Elliott & Rob Simmons, 2007. "Determinants of UK box office success: the impact of quality signals," Working Papers 004730, Lancaster University Management School, Economics Department. [Downloadable!]
    Other versions:
  5. William N. Goetzmann & Vicente Pons-Sanz & S. Abraham Ravid, 2004. "Soft Information, Hard Sell: The Role of Soft Information in the Pricing of Intellectual Property," NBER Working Papers 10468, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
  6. Mark Bowden & Stuart McDonald, 2008. "The Impact of Interaction and Social Learning on Aggregate Expectations," Computational Economics, Springer, vol. 31(3), pages 289-306, April. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
  7. Neeraj Arora & Xavier Dreze & Anindya Ghose & James Hess & Raghuram Iyengar & Bing Jing & Yogesh Joshi & V. Kumar & Nicholas Lurie & Scott Neslin & S. Sajeesh & Meng Su & Niladri Syam & Jacquelyn Thom, 2008. "Putting one-to-one marketing to work: Personalization, customization, and choice," Marketing Letters, Springer, vol. 19(3), pages 305-321, December. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
  8. Anindya Ghose & Bin Gu, 2006. "Search Costs, Demand Structure and Long Tail in Electronic Markets: Theory and Evidence," Working Papers 06-19, NET Institute, revised Oct 2006. [Downloadable!]
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