Expertise, accuracy, and reputation inflation in the wine market: Evidence from Vivino ratings
Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: Review systems, including quantitative measures as well as text-based expression of experiences, are omnipresent in today's digital platform economy. This paper studies the existence of reputation inflation, i.e., unjustified increases in ratings, with a special focus of heterogeneity between experienced and non-experienced users. Using data on more than 5 million reviews from an online wine platform we compare consistency between numerical feedback and textual reviews as well as sentiment measures. Overall the wine platform displays strongly increasing numerical feedback over our time period from 2014 to 2020 while the scores predicted by reviewers’ written feedback remain constant. This difference is consistent across both expert and non-expert reviewers. Online platforms as well as potential customers should be aware of the phenomenon of reputation inflation and simplifying feedback to one number might do a disservice to review platforms’ goal of providing a representative quality assessment.
Source: Journal of Wine Economics
Authors: Rebecca Janssen, Matthew K. Ribar
Institutions: Centre for European Economic Research, Stanford University
Language: English
Subfield: Sociology and Political Science
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
Estimated APC paid: $3,550
OpenAlex ID: W4416349120