Online User Comments versus Professional Reviews: Differential Influences on Pre-release Movie Evaluation
Published 10/17/2008
Author: Anindita Chakravarty, Yong Liu, and Tridib Mazumdar
Anindita Chakravarty is a doctoral student in marketing at the Smeal College of Business, The Pennsylvania State University. Yong Liu is Assistant Professor of Marketing at the Eller College of Management, University of Arizona. Tridib Mazumdar is Howard R. Gendal Professor of Marketing at the Whitman School of Management, Syracuse University.
Summary
Online user comments and critical reviews have become important inputs to consumer decision-making processes, particularly for entertainment products such as movies. In this report, Chakravarty, Liu, and Mazumdar examine the influences of online user comments and reviews by professional critics on moviegoers’ evaluation of to-be-released movies. Unlike extant studies that have treated moviegoers as a homogenous group, their study segments movie audiences into frequent and infrequent moviegoers, a classification that has direct managerial implications for the movie business.
Utilizing an experimental context in which the subjects are exposed to information posted on a simulated website, the authors establish clear causal linkage between the information from online user comments and critical reviews and the subjects’ movie evaluation.
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