TY - JOUR
T1 - The disproportion of crowd wisdom
T2 - The impact of status seeking on Yelp reviews
AU - Yu, Chao
AU - Margolin, Drew
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2021 Yu, Margolin. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
PY - 2021/6
Y1 - 2021/6
N2 - This study shows that while status seeking motivates people to participate in crowdsourcing platforms, it also negatively impacts the bedrock of crowdsourcing-wisdom of crowds. Using Yelp restaurant reviews in 6 cities, we found that motivations of status seeking lead people to review a greater variety of restaurants, and achieving status further encourages this variety seeking as well as the targeting of more expensive restaurants for review. The impact of this individual-level tendency is confirmed by our aggregate-level analysis which shows that restaurants with higher price levels, higher uniqueness levels, and a larger percentage of elite reviews tend to obtain enough reviews to generate wisdom of crowds sooner than other restaurants. This leads to a different kind of distortion to crowd wisdom: an over-representation of status-conferring products and an under-representation of products that are not status-worthy. The findings suggest the importance of studying sources of distortion that are endemic to crowdsourcing itself.
AB - This study shows that while status seeking motivates people to participate in crowdsourcing platforms, it also negatively impacts the bedrock of crowdsourcing-wisdom of crowds. Using Yelp restaurant reviews in 6 cities, we found that motivations of status seeking lead people to review a greater variety of restaurants, and achieving status further encourages this variety seeking as well as the targeting of more expensive restaurants for review. The impact of this individual-level tendency is confirmed by our aggregate-level analysis which shows that restaurants with higher price levels, higher uniqueness levels, and a larger percentage of elite reviews tend to obtain enough reviews to generate wisdom of crowds sooner than other restaurants. This leads to a different kind of distortion to crowd wisdom: an over-representation of status-conferring products and an under-representation of products that are not status-worthy. The findings suggest the importance of studying sources of distortion that are endemic to crowdsourcing itself.
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U2 - 10.1371/journal.pone.0252157
DO - 10.1371/journal.pone.0252157
M3 - Review article
C2 - 34086682
AN - SCOPUS:85107323990
SN - 1932-6203
VL - 16
JO - PloS one
JF - PloS one
IS - 6 June
M1 - e0252157
ER -