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Bias and Reciprocity in Online Reviews: Evidence From Field Experiments on Airbnb
Abstract
Reviews and other evaluations are used by consumers to decide what goods to buy and by firms to choose whom to trade with, hire, or promote. However, because potential reviewers are not compensated for submitting reviews and may have reasons to omit relevant information in their reviews, reviews may be biased. We use the setting of Airbnb to study the determinants of reviewing behavior, the extent to which reviews are biased, and whether changes in the design of reputation systems can reduce that bias. We find that reviews on Airbnb are generally informative and 97% of guests privately report having positive experiences. Using two field experiments intended to reduce bias, we show that non-reviewers tend to have worse experiences than reviewers and that strategic reviewing behavior occurred on the site, although the aggregate effect of the strategic behavior was relatively small. We use a quantitative exercise to show that the mechanisms for bias that we document decrease the rate of reviews with negative text and a non-recommendation by just .86 percentage points. Lastly, we discuss how online marketplaces can design more informative review systems.
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Claims other papers make about this one
Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?
In the citing paper
“Simultaneous revelation of reviews reduces the strategic problems associated with reciprocal reviewing (Bolton et al. 2013, Fradkin et al. 2015).”
From Designing Online Marketplaces: Trust and Reputation Mechanisms (2016) · cites this paper as Fradkin et al. 2015
In the citing paper
“using data on social interactions between buyers and sellers on the site, they show that such interactions result in less negative reviews.”
From Reputation and Feedback Systems in Online Platform Markets (2016) · cites this paper as Fradkin et al. (2015)
In the citing paper
“The experiments and results described in Fradkin et al. (2015) suggest that a challenge for online marketplaces is the potential loss of information following any social interaction of buyers and sellers on a site.”
From Reputation and Feedback Systems in Online Platform Markets (2016) · cites this paper as Fradkin et al. (2015)
In the citing paper
“In a second experiment they disable retaliation in reviews, similar to what eBay did in 2008, and find that retaliation (or rewards for positive feedback) cause a bias but that the magnitude of this bias is smaller than that caused by a lack of incentives to leave truthful feedback.”
From Reputation and Feedback Systems in Online Platform Markets (2016) · cites this paper as Fradkin et al. (2015)
In the citing paper
“In one experiment they offer users a coupon to leave feedback and show that the users who did reported more negative experiences than reviewers in the control group, suggesting that otherwise they would have probably been silent.”
From Reputation and Feedback Systems in Online Platform Markets (2016) · cites this paper as Fradkin et al. (2015)
In the citing paper
“This result suggests that a challenge for online marketplaces is the potential loss of information following the social interaction of buyers and sellers on the site.”
From Reputation and Feedback Systems in Online Platform Markets (2016) · cites this paper as Fradkin et al. (2015)
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Cited by 163
Metadata
- Authors
- Fradkin, A., Grewal, E., Holtz, D., & Pearson, M.
- Affiliations
- National Bureau of Economic Research (US)
- Airbnb (United States) (US)
- ORCID
- Fradkin, Andrey
- Venue
- Proceedings of the Sixteenth ACM Conference on Economics and Computation
- Publisher
- ACM
- Published
- 2015-06-15
- Pages
- 641-641
- OpenAlex
- W2085958018
- Cited by
- 163
- References
- 0
- Citations by year
- 2026: 4 · 2025: 1 · 2024: 7 · 2023: 4 · 2022: 11 · 2021: 8 · 2020: 22 · 2019: 28 · 2018: 32 · 2017: 22 · 2016: 15 · 2015: 9
- Type
- conference abstract
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- ACM Conference on Economics and Computation (EC) (publishedVersion)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Business, Management and Accounting › Marketing › Digital Marketing and Social Media
- Social Sciences › Business, Management and Accounting › Marketing › Sharing Economy and Platforms
- Social Sciences › Business, Management and Accounting › Strategy and Management › Digital Platforms and Economics
- Keywords
- online reviews, review bias, reciprocity, reputation systems, Airbnb, online marketplaces, information asymmetry, consumer evaluation, field experiments
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Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.
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- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Bias and Reciprocity in Online Reviews: Evidence From Field Experiments on Airbnb. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1145/2764468.2764528
- The paper
- Fradkin, A., Grewal, E., Holtz, D., & Pearson, M. (2015). Bias and Reciprocity in Online Reviews: Evidence From Field Experiments on Airbnb. Proceedings of the Sixteenth ACM Conference on Economics and Computation. https://doi.org/10.1145/2764468.2764528
