Interesting Results

Book Reviews Affect Book Rankings

Research in a variety of contexts has shown that people tend to give disproportionate weight to negative information, and 2006 research¹ shows that this is also true in the context of online book reviews. The research focused on how the sales ranking of books on Amazon.com and Barnesandnobel.com are influenced by reviews on the two sites. They found that reviews do affect rankings, but that negative (one star) reviews harm a book’s rankings more than positive (five star) reviews help them.

¹ Chevalier, Judith A. and Dina Mayzlin (2006), “The Effect of Word of Mouth on Sales: Online Book Reviews”, Journal of Marketing, 43(3), 345-354.