Advanced Search

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

Contents:

Author Info

  • Dina Mayzlin

    () (Yale University, School of Management)

  • Judith A. Chevalier

    () (Yale University, School of Management)

Abstract

The creation of online consumer communities to provide product reviews and advice has been touted as an important, albeit somewhat expensive component of Internet retail strategies. In this paper, we characterize reviewer behavior at two popular Internet sites and examine the effect of consumer reviews on firms' sales. We use publicly available data from the two leading online booksellers, Amazon.com and BarnesandNoble.com, to construct measures of each firm's sales of individual books. We also gather extensive consumer review data at the two sites. First, we characterize the reviewer behavior on the two sites such as the distribution of the number of ratings and the valence and length of ratings, as well as ratings across different subject categories. Second, we measure the effect of individual reviews on the relative shares of books across the two sites. We argue that our methodology of comparing the sales and reviews of a given book across Internet retailers allows us to improve on the existing literature by better capturing a causal relationship between word of mouth (reviews) and sales since we are able to difference out factors that affect the sales and word of mouth of both retailers, such as the book's quality. We examine the incremental sales effects of having reviews for a particular book versus not having reviews and also the differential sales effects of positive and negative reviews. Our large database of books also allows us to control for other important confounding factors such as differences across the sites in prices and shipping times.

Download Info

If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the proper application to view it first. In case of further problems read the IDEAS help page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
File URL: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=432481
Download Restriction: no

Bibliographic Info

Paper provided by Yale School of Management in its series Yale School of Management Working Papers with number ysm413.

Download reference. The following formats are available: HTML (with abstract), plain text (with abstract), BibTeX, RIS (EndNote, RefMan, ProCite), ReDIF
Length:
Date of creation: 12 Aug 2003
Date of revision:
Handle: RePEc:ysm:somwrk:ysm413

Contact details of provider:
Web page: http://icf.som.yale.edu/
More information through EDIRC

For corrections or technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its listing, contact: ().

Related research

Keywords: Advertising; word-of-mouth; source credibility; internet marketing;

Other versions of this item:

Find related papers by JEL classification:

This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

References

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. Karen Clay & Ramayya Krishnan & eric_wolff, 2001. "Prices and Price Dispersion on the Web: Evidence from the Online Book Industry," NBER Chapters, in: E-commerce, pages 521-539 National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
  2. A. Banerjee & Drew Fudenberg, 2010. "Word-of-Mouth Communication and Social Learning," Levine's Working Paper Archive 425, David K. Levine.
  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.
  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.
  5. 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.
  6. Christopher Avery & Paul Resnick & Richard Zeckhauser, 1999. "The Market for Evaluations," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 89(3), pages 564-584, June.
Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

Citations

Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
Cited by:
  1. Beck, Jonathan, 2009. "Diderot's rule," MPRA Paper 17404, University Library of Munich, Germany.
  2. Goknil N. Kocak & N. Serdar Sever, 2011. "Should I Take It or Should I Not? Exploration of Students’ Course Choice as a Product," International Review of Management and Marketing, Econjournals, vol. 1(1), pages 1-7, April.
  3. Jonathan Beck, 2007. "The sales effect of word of mouth: a model for creative goods and estimates for novels," Journal of Cultural Economics, Springer, vol. 31(1), pages 5-23, March.
  4. Caroline Elliott & Rob Simmons, 2008. "Determinants of UK Box Office Success: The Impact of Quality Signals," Review of Industrial Organization, Springer, vol. 33(2), pages 93-111, September.
  5. David Godes & Dina Mayzlin & Yubo Chen & Sanjiv Das & Chrysanthos Dellarocas & Bruce Pfeiffer & Barak Libai & Subrata Sen & Mengze Shi & Peeter Verlegh, 2005. "The Firm's Management of Social Interactions," Marketing Letters, Springer, vol. 16(3), pages 415-428, December.
  6. Enrico Moretti, 2011. "Social Learning and Peer Effects in Consumption: Evidence from Movie Sales," Review of Economic Studies, Oxford University Press, vol. 78(1), pages 356-393.
  7. Alexia Gaudeul, 2010. "Software marketing on the Internet: the use of samples and repositories," Economics of Innovation and New Technology, Taylor and Francis Journals, vol. 19(3), pages 259-281.
  8. 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.
  9. 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.
  10. John Ashworth & Bruno Heyndels & Kristien Werck, 2010. "Expert judgements and the demand for novels in Flanders," Journal of Cultural Economics, Springer, vol. 34(3), pages 197-218, August.
  11. Mark Bowden & Stuart McDonald, 2008. "The Impact of Interaction and Social Learning on Aggregate Expectations," Computational Economics, Society for Computational Economics, vol. 31(3), pages 289-306, April.
  12. 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.

Lists

This item is not listed on Wikipedia, on a reading list or among the top items on IDEAS.

Statistics

Access and download statistics

Corrections

When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:ysm:somwrk:ysm413

For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: ().

If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

If references are entirely missing, you can add them using this form.

If the full references list an item that is present in RePEc, but the system did not link to it, you can help with this form.

If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.