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...

We examine the effect of managerial response on consumer voice in a dynamic quality environment. We argue that, in this environment, the consumer is motivated to write reviews by, in addition to altruism, the possibility that the reviews will impact the quality of the service directly. We...

Managers are very interested in word of mouth communication because they believe that a product's success is related to the word of mouth that it generates. However, there are at least three significant challenges associated with measuring word of mouth. First, how does one even gather the data?...

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...

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...