Digitization and Pre-Purchase Information: The Causal and Welfare Impacts of Reviews and Crowd Ratings
中文摘要
数字化带来了许多新的创造性产品，使专业评论者和消费者的能力捉襟见肘。然而，零售业的数字化也提供了新的基于大众的购前信息来源。我们在图书出版领域比较了专业评论者与基于大众的亚马逊星级评分对消费者福利的相对影响。运用各种固定效应和断点回归方法，我们估计了它们对销售额的因果影响。我们使用这些因果估计来校准一个结构性需求模型。在我们的基准估计中，星级评分对消费者剩余的总效应是传统评论平台效应的十倍以上。(JEL D83, L15, L81, L82)
Abstract
Digitization has led to many new creative products, straining the capacity of professional critics and consumers. Yet, the digitization of retailing has also delivered new crowd-based sources of pre-purchase information. We compare the relative impacts of professional critics and crowd-based Amazon star ratings on consumer welfare in book publishing. Using various fixed effects and discontinuity-based empirical strategies, we estimate their causal impacts on sales. We use these causal estimates to calibrate a structural demand model. The aggregate effect of star ratings on consumer surplus is, in our baseline estimates, more than ten times the effect of traditional review outlets. (JEL D83, L15, L81, L82)