Earlier this week one of Belkin’s employees has been caught manufacturing product reviews on Amazon.com(In fact, he paid for them). Many customers rely on these reviews to make purchase decisions, but as stated in Scott Brave’s Seven Deadly Biases article posted below, these reviews are frequently a subject of gaming.
Gaming Bias
Another type of reviewer is someone who is “gaming” the system. Sometimes such gaming is malicious, but often it’s altruistic. While writing this article I went onto Amazon (Nasdaq: AMZN) to look at the reviews of a book I co-authored called Wired for Speech. The first one was very positive; perhaps someone my coauthor knows. But I have no doubts about the second 5-star review, titled “Amazing Insight.” To my surprise, it was from my dad! Enough said.Gaming such as this is actually the rule, rather than the exception on Amazon and other media sites where products have authors or artists and personal connections abound. I admit to having given 5 stars to articles on my company … heck, if I can do it for this one, I will. Go ahead, try it out, give this five stars if you can!
For more of this whitepaper on The Seven Deadly Consumer Biases click here.
The irony is that the guy used Amazon’s Mechanical Turk to game Amazon.com. Here’s a link to the full article.
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