Bias in expert product reviews

DOI

The STATA-dataset is used in the article "Bias in expert product reviews". There is also a STATA-do file. In combination this recreates all tables in the article. The files are self-explanatory. 

Article abstract: Many expert reviews of products such as cars, books, movies and restaurants are non-blind. Whether such reviews can be taken at face value is questionable, but hard evidence on the presence of reviewer bias is rare. This holds particularly true for conflicts of interest that are thought to be common in non-blind product reviews but are not readily observable: ad hoc relationships between reviewers and producers. We present a textbook case of a long-running expert product review in the food service industry for which we know the reviewer’s conflict of interest: being affiliated to one particular producer. As is typical, only insiders were aware of the possible source of bias in the review. The review resembles other non-blind tests of product quality. We find evidence of a sizable bias in the reviewers’ ratings. Our findings suggest that reviewers’ ad hoc relationships with producers, often dismissed as ‘coming with the job’, can be very harmful.

This entry is a two-file data package totaling 302.8 KB, containing files in .dta and .do formats.If you use this dataset, please cite: van Ours, Jan; Vollaard, Ben (2022). Bias in expert product reviews. Erasmus University Rotterdam (EUR). Dataset. https://doi.org/10.25397/eur.20462598

Identifier
DOI https://doi.org/10.34894/W4QXNP
Metadata Access https://dataverse.nl/oai?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=oai_datacite&identifier=doi:10.34894/W4QXNP
Provenance
Creator van Ours, Jan ORCID logo; Vollaard, Ben ORCID logo
Publisher DataverseNL
Contributor van Ours, Jan
Publication Year 2025
Rights CC-BY-4.0; info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess; http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
OpenAccess true
Contact van Ours, Jan (Erasmus School of Economics <https://ror.org/057w15z03>)
Representation
Resource Type Dataset
Format application/x-stata-14; application/x-stata-syntax
Size 296645; 5184
Version 1.0
Discipline Economics; Social and Behavioural Sciences