How Should We Deal with Malicious Customers’ Threats in Online Review? Perspectives of Retailers, Customers, and Platforms

Abstract

We show that existence of malicious customers will distort the retailer's overall rating and under certain conditions, complying to malicious customers' request can actually increase its profit. In addition, we examine the importance of information provided by the platform, including the actually product quality and customer preference. Counter-intuitively, we show that retailer may not always use the perfect information as compliance with malicious customers can obtain positive ratings from them. This work also generates important implications for both retailers and platforms when dealing with malicious reviews.