Profiling in Online Hotel Reviews to Overcome Fake Reviews
Keywords:
Manipulation, authenticity, decision making, e- commerce, marketing strategies, fake reviewsAbstract
Online reviews are a vital part of the decision path nowadays. Online reviews opinion could greatly improve consumers' ability to assess products. However, the validity of online reviews remains a concern. Generally, it is not known to what extent these reviews are authentic and truthful. Online business encourages synthesis of positive reviews for their own products and negative reviews for their competitors. In this paper, we undertake an analysis of fake reviews, examining online market environment that inspires or demoralize fake reviewing activity. We examine reviews of a hotel on two travel websites having different online review structure: one with reviewers’ profiles and second with no reviewers’ profiles. A sample size of 279 reviews was collected from both websites. We examined the difference in reviews for a hotel between the two websites. Further we illustrate that hotel has high ratings on website with no reviewers’ profiles than with reviewers’ profiles.
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