Histogram Distortion Bias in Consumer Choices

Existing research on word-of-mouth considers various descriptive statistics of rating distributions, such as the mean, variance, skewness, kurtosis, and even entropy and the Herfindahl-Hirschman index. But real-world consumer decisions are often derived from visual assessment of displayed rating distributions in the form of histograms. In this study, we argue that such distribution charts may inadvertently lead to a consumer-choice bias that we call the histogram distortion bias (HDB). We propose that salient features of distributions in visual decision making may mislead consumers and result in inferior decision making. In an illustrative model, we derive a measure of the HDB. We show that with the HDB, consumers may make choices that violate well-accepted decision rules. In a series of experiments, subjects are observed to prefer products with a higher HDB despite a lower average rating. They could also violate widely accepted modeling assumptions, such as branch independence and first-order stochastic dominance.