Veranstaltungsprogramm der VHB Jahrestagung

The world of marketing undergoes a substantial transformation with the emergence of spatial computer-simulated environments, which enable new forms of shopping, entertainment, but also work and scientific research. While these spatial environments can be accessed with widely available 2D interfaces such as smartphones and PCs, specific devices such as virtual-reality (VR) headsets have been argued to offer superior user experiences because they are able to provide users with a higher level of psychological presence, as the state of being in a virtual world. But do consumers truly prefer high levels of such presence, which might be associated with lower levels of presence in the user’s physical environment? While this question is of essence for the future of spatial marketing and particularly for producers of virtual-reality headsets such as Meta, Lenovo, and soon Apple, little is known about the issue yet. We report theoretical arguments and empirical insights from experimental studies we conducted at Münster’s eXperimental Reality Lab in which we compare responses to high-presence VR headsets and lower-presence devices and derive managerial implications from them.

Extant research underscores the pivotal role of online ratings in shaping consumer decisions, assuming that these online ratings provide a discernible guide for informed choices. However, a pervasive pattern on various e-commerce websites challenges this assumption, with an increasing prevalence of overly positive online ratings.

Our study, situated in the search stage, when consumers form their consideration sets, aims to investigate whether and how these overly positive online ratings affect consumers’ decision-making. We first document the extent of online rating skewness across three prominent e-commerce websites. Second, relying on the principles of prospect theory, we examine its impact on consumer decision-making. Finally, we explore whether potential adjustments could mitigate the challenge of online rating skewness for the most often-used five-star rating.

Our study documents the prevalence of left-skewed online rating distributions in samples extracted from Amazon, Walmart, and Booking. We further find a growing skewness trend in online ratings on the Amazon Marketplace over time. Our key finding reveals that consumers employ a binary approach to online ratings. Once a product’s rating surpasses a particular reference point (4.2-stars), it is considered for inclusion in consumers’ consideration set, with no differentiation for higher online ratings up to 4.8-stars. Remarkably, alternative online rating designs fail to mitigate consumers’ decision-making process.