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Word-of-Mouth (WOM) is oral, person-to-person communication between a receiver and a communicator whom the receiver perceives as non-commercial regarding a brand, product, or service (Arndt, 1967). Before the advent of the internet revolution, consumers used WOM communication, opinions shared by friends and family to buy goods from brick-and-mortar stores. Widespread use of the internet in the world has led to high usage and adoption of eCommerce. In the year 2016, Jack Dawson showed that 60% of shoppers use the internet to buy goods and services in a developed country like South Africa (Dawson, 2016). Traditional WOM communication has metamorphosed into an electronic word of mouth or eWOM, such as online consumer reviews, which is a platform to share an opinion and consumer experience.
Researchers present vast evidence that online consumer reviews play a crucial role in influencing the customer's purchase intentions (Forman et al., 2008; Mudambi & Schuff, 2010). Some popular online consumer review platforms, such as Amazon, TripAdvisor, Yelp, allow customers to post their opinion using product ratings, discussion forums, chats, and blogs. Existing studies found that online reviews' mere presence could promote sales of the underlying product compared with those similar products without online reviews (Duan et al., 2008). Thus, online reviews could be both a cause and effect of the popularity of a product.
Because of this correlation between the popularity of a product and its online reviews, sellers or product manufacturers have a strong incentive to manipulate online reviews to promote their products, like artificially boosting the number of positive reviews as well as the ratings given by each of the reviewers (Luca & Zervas, 2016). Knowing the importance of online reviews makes them vulnerable to manipulation. Companies like GettingBookReviews.com and getfivestar.com even help authors, retailers, or manufacturers post reviews to boost their sales.
We can classify online review manipulations into at least three types 1. anonymously posting promotional messages 2. hiding or deleting unfavorable messages 3. offering incentives to consumers to post favorable reviews (Dellarocas & Narayan, 2006; Mayzlin, 2006). Sellers sometimes even intentionally write fake negative reviews against their competitors to boost their average reviews as compared to the competing product. Firms may benefit from these manipulated reviews but once found they may lose their customers' trust, which may have an adverse effect like the decrease in the sale, losing brand loyalty, etc.
The manipulation of online reviews is prevalent in many product categories; most of the time, it is hard to detect fake reviews, as paid professionals mostly write them. In this study, we intend to detect online review manipulation on a specific product category, the bestselling books. We chose this category because there is both known media coverage of manipulation on bestselling books and its strong influence on sales volume when a book becomes a bestseller.