The DOI matches its Crossref record; 8 of the 8 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
Reviews without a Purchase: Low Ratings, Loyal Customers, and Deception
Open accessAbstract
The authors document that approximately 5% of product reviews on a large private label retailer's website are submitted by customers with no record of ever purchasing the product they are reviewing. These reviews are significantly more negative than other reviews. They are also less likely to contain expressions describing the fit or feel of the items and more likely to contain linguistic cues associated with deception. More than 12,000 of the firm's best customers have written reviews without confirmed transactions. On average, these customers have each made more than 150 purchases from the firm. This makes it unlikely that the reviews were written by the employees or agents of a competitor and suggests that deceptive reviews may not be limited to the strategic actions of firms. Instead, the phenomenon may be far more prevalent, extending to individual customers who have no financial incentive to influence product ratings.
Overview
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Verification
Claims the paper makes
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
The self-check needs the paper’s full text.
Citations
Cites
How Much Should We Trust Differences-in-Differences Estimates?
Bertrand, M., Duflo, E., & Mullainathan, S. (2004) · The Quarterly Journal of Economics · doi:10.1162/003355304772839588 · Cited by 10,641
The Effect of Word of Mouth on Sales: Online Book Reviews
Chevalier, J. A., & Mayzlin, D. (2006) · Journal of Marketing Research · doi:10.1509/jmkr.43.3.345 · Cited by 6,003
DePaulo, B. M., Lindsay, J. J., Malone, B. E., Muhlenbruck, L., Charlton, K., & Cooper, H. (2003) · Psychological Bulletin · doi:10.1037/0033-2909.129.1.74 · Cited by 2,479
Accuracy of Deception Judgments
Bond, C. F., & DePaulo, B. M. (2006) · Personality and Social Psychology Review · doi:10.1207/s15327957pspr1003_2 · Cited by 1,953
Finding Deceptive Opinion Spam by Any Stretch of the Imagination
Ott, M., Choi, Y., Cardie, C., & Hancock, J. T. (2011) · arXiv · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1107.4557 · Cited by 1,008
Firm-Created Word-of-Mouth Communication: Evidence from a Field Test
Godes, D., & Mayzlin, D. (2009) · Marketing Science · doi:10.1287/mksc.1080.0444 · Cited by 837
Spotting fake reviewer groups in consumer reviews
Mukherjee, A., Liu, B., & Glance, N. (2012) · Proceedings of the 21st international conference on World Wide Web · doi:10.1145/2187836.2187863 · Cited by 773
Assessment, enhancement, and verification determinants of the self-evaluation process.
Sedikides, C. (1993) · Journal of Personality and Social Psychology · doi:10.1037/0022-3514.65.2.317 · Cited by 710
Research works printed but not linked: 38
- 10.1016/0022-1031(83)90034-3 · DOI
- 10.1007/3-540-44853-5_7 · DOI · Paper page
- 10.1509/jmkr.47.3.553 · DOI · Paper page
- 10.1287/mnsc.1060.0567 · DOI · Paper page
- 10.1111/1467-8721.ep10770433 · DOI
- Donath Judith, 1999, Communities in Cyberspace, 29
- 10.1177/0146167204264047 · DOI · Paper page
- 10.1177/002224298705100107 · DOI · Paper page
- Fiske Susan T., 2001, Motivated Social Perception: The Ontario Symposium, 9
- 10.1080/00909880305377 · DOI
- Gatignon Hubert, 1986, Advances in Consumer Research, 13, 534
- 10.1287/mksc.1040.0071 · DOI · Paper page
- 10.1287/mksc.1110.0653 · DOI · Paper page
- Haig Matt, 2003, Brand Failures: The Truth About the 100 Biggest Branding Mistakes of All Time.
- 10.1109/CSE.2009.109 · DOI
- 10.1016/j.dss.2010.08.009 · DOI · Paper page
- 10.1109/ICDM.2007.68 · DOI
- Kornish Laura J., 2009, “Are User Reviews Systematically Manipulated? Evidence from Helpfulness Ratings,”
- 10.1509/jmkr.48.5.881 · DOI · Paper page
- 10.1287/isre.1070.0154 · DOI · Paper page
- Luca Michael, 2013, “Fake It Till You Make It: Reputation, Competition, and Yelp Review Fraud,”
- 10.1287/mksc.1050.0137 · DOI · Paper page
- Mayzlin Dina, 2013, American Economic Review
- 10.1287/mksc.1110.0662 · DOI · Paper page
- 10.1509/jmkr.48.3.444 · DOI · Paper page
- 10.1177/0146167203029005010 · DOI · Paper page
- 10.1145/1639714.1639774 · DOI
- Ott Myle, 2011, Proceedings of the 49th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics., 309
- 10.1086/432235 · DOI · Paper page
- Simester Duncan I., 2011, Harvard Business Review
- 10.1111/j.1460-2466.2011.01619.x · DOI · Paper page
- 10.2139/ssrn.908999 · DOI
- 10.1145/1964858.1964860 · DOI
- 10.1007/978-3-211-93971-0_4 · DOI
- 10.1109/TPC.2005.849652 · DOI
- 10.1023/B:GRUP.0000011944.62889.6f · DOI · Paper page
- 10.1007/3-540-44853-5_8 · doi:10.1007/3-540-44853-5_8
- Zuckerman Miron, 1985, Multichannel Integrations of Nonverbal Behavior, 129
Cited by
Digital marketing: a framework, review, and research agenda
Kannan, P. K., & Li, H. “. (2017) · International Journal of Research in Marketing · doi:10.1016/j.ijresmar.2016.11.006 · Cited by 1,707
Fake It Till You Make It: Reputation, Competition, and Yelp Review Fraud
Luca, M., & Zervas, G. (2016) · Management Science · doi:10.1287/mnsc.2015.2304 · Cited by 1,263
Babić Rosario, A., Sotgiu, F., De Valck, K., & Bijmolt, T. H. A. (2016) · Journal of Marketing Research · doi:10.1509/jmr.14.0380 · Cited by 1,073
Uniting the Tribes: Using Text for Marketing Insight
Berger, J., Humphreys, A., Ludwig, S., Moe, W. W., Netzer, O., & Schweidel, D. A. (2020) · Journal of Marketing · doi:10.1177/0022242919873106 · Cited by 742
Automated Text Analysis for Consumer Research
Humphreys, A., & Wang, R. J.-H. (2018) · Journal of Consumer Research · doi:10.1093/jcr/ucx104 · Cited by 636
Metadata
- Authors
- Anderson, E. T., & Simester, D. I.
- Venue
- Journal of Marketing Research
- Publisher
- SAGE Publications
- Published
- 2014-06
- Volume
- 51
- Issue
- 3
- Pages
- 249-269
- ISSN
- 0022-2437 (ISSN-L)
- 1547-7193
- OpenAlex
- W2130852771
- Cited by
- 292
- References
- 8
- FWCI
- 56.21
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
- Licence
- journals.sagepub.com/page/policies/text-and-data-mining-license (tdm)
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
How to cite
Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.
- This page
- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Reviews without a Purchase: Low Ratings, Loyal Customers, and Deception. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1509/jmr.13.0209
- The paper
- Anderson, E. T., & Simester, D. I. (2014). Reviews without a Purchase: Low Ratings, Loyal Customers, and Deception. Journal of Marketing Research. https://doi.org/10.1509/jmr.13.0209
Data sources
Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.