Bargain Hunting on Black Friday - Making Great Deals and Bragging About Them

Abstract

Online customer reviews (OCRs) are helpful when they provide an unbiased view on a product. Large-scale shopping events (e.g., Black Friday) generate large volumes of OCRs. We hypothesize that OCRs from such events are biased due to price discounts and smart shopper feelings. To test our hypotheses, we use OCR data of a large US electronics retailer that emerge from Black Friday purchases and regular purchases. We find that numerical ratings from Black Friday purchases are considerably higher. This effect is also observable in an increase of the average numerical rating through Black Friday purchases. We further observe that textual OCR content from Black Friday purchases focuses more on the purchase conditions (e.g., price discounts) at the expense of other, potentially more helpful content. We further provide managerial implications on how retailers may counteract the negative consequences of such biased OCRs on the quality of their OCR systems.