Most news stories contain both granular quantitative information and coarse categorizations. For instance, company earnings are reported as a dollar figure alongside categorizations, such as whether earnings beat or missed market expectations. We formalize and study the hypothesis that when a...

Online ratings emerge from a multi-stage process that can systematically distort their informational content. We develop a unified framework decomposing the rating process into distinct components: experienced quality (driven by intrinsic quality, seller effort, and price), expectations formed...