Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Building upon previous literature that demonstrates the effect of average rating and number of reviews on consumerbehavior, the present study begged the question of how rating distributions influence perception of product quality at theindividual consumer level. To address this question, we presented a wide range of rating variances for each average ratingfrom 1.1 to 4.9 in a 5-star system and asked participants to indicate their perceived quality of each product on a scale of1 10. The behavioral study revealed an interaction between average rating and rating variance: Among all products of thesame average rating, when the average rating was low (below 2.5), people judged less-variable products to be of higherquality, whereas when the average rating was high (above 2.5), people judged more-variable products to be of higherquality. A utility-based cognitive model was developed to identify the underlying mechanisms of this reversed preference.