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I think incenting people to review products defeats the whole point of what Amazon has to offer--genuine opinions about products from actual users. As mentione

by minouye 16y ago

I think incenting people to review products defeats the whole point of what Amazon has to offer--genuine opinions about products from actual users. As mentioned above, no other e-commerce site has volume of reviews that Amazon has and few look poised to overtake them. Epinions took the incentive route and I think the difference in value is pretty apparent. Once you start compensating users for submitting "something", the value of that "something" is going to be pretty minimal.

ryandvm 16y ago
Yeah - but putting an incentive behind the process would remove the obvious self-selection biases. Right now, there are two reasons that people would post a review: 1) They had an exceptional experience with the product and feel the need to react to that. 2) They are the type of person that likes to tell the world about their experiences. Unfortunately, both of those are a very small subset of total purchases and, most likely, highly overlapping. Which means you won't get the proportionally accurate number of reviews in the middle range. And you won't get reviews from Luddites or online recluses. If you put an incentive behind the review system, perhaps you'd have people gaming the system, but at least you'd have a better shot at hitting a wider demographic of product reviewers. You are probably right though. Amazon, like Google, is very, very good at analyzing piles of data to make market decisions. They may well have already piloted review incentives. Regardless, I suspect they've already got numbers that back up their current process.
- minouye 16y ago
  I think the incentive compounds the self-selection bias. For someone who is an expert in say audio equipment, a small monetary reward isn't going to encourage him/her to post a review (assuming they have a decent amount of disposable income). However, for those who could greatly benefit from that incentive, they'll post reviews like there's no tomorrow. Another great example of how Amazon has succeeded with user generated content is Listmania--genuinely helpful product lists, all provided for free. I don't completely understand the psychology of why these are created, but I value the content greatly because I know that contributors are not compensated for their suggestions.

by minouye 16y ago

ryandvm 16y ago

Yeah - but putting an incentive behind the process would remove the obvious self-selection biases. Right now, there are two reasons that people would post a review: 1) They had an exceptional experience with the product and feel the need to react to that. 2) They are the type of person that likes to tell the world about their experiences. Unfortunately, both of those are a very small subset of total purchases and, most likely, highly overlapping. Which means you won't get the proportionally accurate number of reviews in the middle range. And you won't get reviews from Luddites or online recluses. If you put an incentive behind the review system, perhaps you'd have people gaming the system, but at least you'd have a better shot at hitting a wider demographic of product reviewers. You are probably right though. Amazon, like Google, is very, very good at analyzing piles of data to make market decisions. They may well have already piloted review incentives. Regardless, I suspect they've already got numbers that back up their current process.

minouye 16y ago
I think the incentive compounds the self-selection bias. For someone who is an expert in say audio equipment, a small monetary reward isn't going to encourage him/her to post a review (assuming they have a decent amount of disposable income). However, for those who could greatly benefit from that incentive, they'll post reviews like there's no tomorrow. Another great example of how Amazon has succeeded with user generated content is Listmania--genuinely helpful product lists, all provided for free. I don't completely understand the psychology of why these are created, but I value the content greatly because I know that contributors are not compensated for their suggestions.