A study on fraud reviews: Incentives to manipulate and effect on sales

With the broad reach of Internet, online reviews have become an important source of electronic Word-of-Mouth. Fraud reviews that are deliberately posted by businesses are a type of online reviews. This paper discusses the incentives of fraud reviews and the effect of fraud reviews on consumer behavior through empirical research. Using book download data at Amazon, we find that a book is more likely to manipulate fraud reviews when it has few online reviews posted by real consumers, higher proportion of negative reviews, longer average length of negative reviews, lower average rating scored by real users and higher price. And fraud reviews change the review environment and have a significant impact on the consumer purchasing decisions. More number, higher proportion, longer word count and higher promotion of rating of fraud reviews lead to higher sales. The results also show consumers can discern the manipulation of fraud reviews to a certain extent.