MARKETING AND MANAGEMENT COMMUNICATION


Te Good, the Bad and the Picky: Consumer Heterogeneity and the Reversal of Movie


TOMASSO BONDI ASSISTANT PROFESSOR


Samuel Curtis Johnson Graduate School of Management


Cornell SC Johnson College of Business Cornell University


Co-authors • Tomasso Bondi


Assistant professor, Samuel Curtis Johnson Graduate School of Management, Cornell SC Johnson College of Business, Cornell University


• Michelangelo Rossi, Center for Economic Studies and the Ifo Institute for Economic Research, Munich Germany, and Institut Polytechnique de Paris, Palaiseau, France • Ryan L. Stevens, Ramp Corporation, New York, New York


Summary Consumers differ in their experience, which can affect both their choices and


ratings. Tus, biases in average ratings can appear when the opinions of expe- rienced and novice users are aggregated. Bondi and his co-authors study the impact of consumer heterogeneity on online ratings. Te authors first build a two-period model to characterize the biases’ drivers and consequences, and they test their theory combining data from IMDb and MovieLens, two well- known movie ratings platforms.


Tey proxy users’ experience with the total number of ratings posted on the platforms. First, using external measures of quality, such as the Academy Awards and nominations, they show that, on both platforms, experienced users compared with novices usually rate movies of higher quality and post more stringent ratings for more than 98% of movies. Combined, these imply a compression in aggregate ratings, and thus a bias against high quality movies. Te authors then propose a simple, fixed-point algorithm to debias ratings, which demonstrate the presence of ranking reversals for more than 8% of comparisons in the sample. As a result, debiased ratings better correlate with external measures of quality.


Ratings Management Science, 71, 8, August 2025 LINK TO PAPER


CONTENTS TO MAIN


| RESEARCH WITH IMPACT: CORNELL SC JOHNSON COLLEGE OF BUSINESS • 2025 EDITION


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