Measurement of Trustworthiness of the Online Reviews

Abstract: In electronic commerce (e-commerce)markets, a decision-maker faces a sequential choice problem. Third-party intervention plays an important role in making purchase decisions in this choice process. For instance, while purchasing products/services online, a buyer's choice or behavior is often affected by the overall reviewers' ratings, feedback, etc. Moreover, the reviewer is also a decision-maker. After purchase, the decision-maker would put forth their reviews for the product, online. Such reviews would affect the purchase decision of another potential buyer, who would read the reviews before conforming to his/her final purchase. The question that arises is \textit{how trustworthy are these review reports and ratings?} The trustworthiness of these review reports and ratings is based on whether the reviewer is a rational or an irrational person. Indexing the reviewer's rationality could be a way to quantify a reviewer's rationality but it does not communicate the history of his/her behavior. In this article, the researcher aims at formally deriving a rationality pattern function and thereby, the degree of rationality of the decision-maker or the reviewer in the sequential choice problem in the e-commerce markets. Applying such a rationality pattern function could make it easier to quantify the rational behavior of an agent who participates in the digital markets. This, in turn, is expected to minimize the information asymmetry within the decision-making process and identify the paid reviewers or manipulative reviews.