gzervas

5 ms·

1.
by gzervas 12y ago
Hi, co-author of the paper here. To answer your question, yes, there is evidence to suggest that targeted ads work better: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1600259
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Do-Not-Track and the Economics of Third-Party Advertising(papers.ssrn.com)
5 points by gzervas 12y ago|0 comments
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by gzervas 13y ago
That's why we checked whether advertisers are getting preferential filtering treatment. (They aren't according to our data.) Read my previous comment, or better yet read the paper where we also explain possible pitfalls in the ana
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by gzervas 13y ago
While I read such anecdotes, I cannot rely much on them for research. Instead, what we did for our paper was to collect thousands of filtered reviews, and check their characteristics against reviews Yelp publishes. We find that filtered rev
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by gzervas 13y ago
If there exists a material connection between the owner and the reviewer which is not disclosed in the review then the FTC considers this to be deceptive advertising. A material connection is defined to be something "that is, important
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by gzervas 13y ago
We'd love to incorporate your data in our analysis if you are willing to share.
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by gzervas 13y ago
While I agree with you about the title of the article, it is not true at all that "all non-removed reviews are assumed, in the data, to be real." In fact, in our analysis we explicitly allow for the filter misclassifying reviews (
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by gzervas 13y ago
(Mostly answering to the deleted grandparent here.) "In the meantime, they benefit from charging businesses to allow positive reviews to appear and to suppress negative reviews (if they're doing that, it would explain why they don
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by gzervas 13y ago
I don't know what goes into Yelp's filter either. I also agree that it can make mistakes. At the same time, I do think that the filter is more likely to catch a fake review than it is to catch a real review. This is the assumption
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by gzervas 13y ago
Hi everyone, co-author of the paper here. I wanted to clarify the 20% figure. We actually have no way of telling how many, or which reviews are fake. We do not directly observe review fraud, and we clearly spell this out in the paper. The 2
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by gzervas 14y ago
Are you saying it's Yelp's responsibility to protect unsophisticated users from themselves? Also, I am not quite sure "a lot of people" will behave as you describe.
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by gzervas 14y ago
True, Yelp got the filtering completely backwards in this instance. But, do you base any economic decision on two 5-star reviews from two Yelpers with 0 friends and 4 reviews combined?
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by gzervas 15y ago
You're right, statistical significance is a valid concern but error bars is not the way to go. Check the paper for a rigorous analysis. We are not drawing our conclusions from a single plot.