Reviewing the simple things – How ease of evaluation affects online rating behavior

Online reviews play a considerable role in reducing the information asymmetry between sellers and potential consumers. Despite the rich body of literature on online reviews and rat-ing behaviors, little is known about the influence that the ease (or difficulty) involved in eval-uating a product or service—or their attributes—has on ratings. Indeed, certain product or service characteristics are easier to review and evaluate than others. In this paper we investi-gate the potential rating differences that arise from the ease of evaluation, both on a category and on an attribute level. In two distinct studies we analyze datasets from, respectively, Yelp (category level) and Google Maps (attribute level) and conduct linear regression with fixed-effects. Our results suggest that ratings of easy-to-evaluate product and service categories are more extreme than ratings of difficult-to-evaluate categories. This does not hold for attributes, however. The contrast between category and attribute level reveals that the impact of ease of evaluation cannot be fully explained by expectation-(dis)confirmation theory. Hence, we briefly discuss alternative theoretical explanations. Our results have important practical impli-cations for platforms offering goods and services that differ in their ease of evaluation, to re-dress the biases created by these differences in rating behaviors.