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Cited by 292

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 access
Anderson, Eric T., Simester, Duncan I.·2014·Journal of Marketing Research

Abstract

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.

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Cites

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Citations

Cites

Show all 8 references

Research works printed but not linked: 38

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Metadata

Authors
Anderson, E. T., & Simester, D. I.
Venue
Journal of Marketing Research
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)

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CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Reviews without a Purchase: Low Ratings, Loyal Customers, and Deception. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1509/jmr.13.0209
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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

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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.