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Trustworthiness of online beer ratings as a source of social information

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Abstract

People increasingly use the internet as a source of social information. The pay-offs associated with using such information depend on its quality in terms of content and bias. A key question is therefore what information is contained in socially acquired information and whether it is biased. For example, social information may be biased due to conformism if people ‘producing’ (i.e. posting) information adjust it based on existing social information. We addressed these questions by focussing on ratings of beers posted by Finns on the internet, which people use as a source of social information when making consumer decisions. To model the information contained in beer ratings, we analysed a repeated measures longitudinal dataset of >130 000 beer ratings collected by 490 Finns and estimated key variance components. We decomposed variation in social information (i.e. ratings) into variation attributable to characteristics of the beer (beer identity, beer style, brewery and country of brewery), characteristics of the (individual) rater, variation caused by temporal effects and residual variation. Moreover, we compared blind with non-blind rating scores to evaluate whether conformism represented a source of bias. The majority (65.1%) of the variation in beer ratings was explained by beer characteristics, 9.5% by the identity of the rater and <0.5% by temporal effects; only 25.1% of the variance remained unexplained. Blind ratings were positively correlated with non-blind ratings, suggesting that conformism did not introduce a major bias. Our findings imply that beer ratings posted on the internet may represent a relatively unbiased and informative source of social information.

Significance statement

People use social information when taking behavioural decisions. Social information content may be biased due to conformism when people produce information non-independently. It is important to know whether social information is biased since social information that is of low quality is not useful. We quantified the information content of and bias in human beer ratings posted on the internet, which many people use as a source of social information. We show that beer ratings can be considered as an informative and unbiased source of social information: beer characteristics explain the majority of variation in beer rating scores, and blind and non-blind ratings were positively associated, implying that people do not produce biased ratings when scoring beers.

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Acknowledgments

PTN was supported by DFG (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, NI 1539/1-1). We thank Marika Pesonen and Anne Rutten for a stimulating dinner during which we tasted highly rated beers and conceived the idea for this study. We also thank two anonymous reviewers for the constructive comments on earlier versions of this article, Timo Kanniainen and Seppo Äyräväinen for checking beer ‘facts’ detailed in this paper and Seppo Äyräväinen for kindly providing us access to the beer rating data. We also thank Jim Vorel (from www.pastemagazine.com) and Joe Tucker (from www.ratebeer.com) for providing access for the data used in the analysis of conformism and reputation bias.

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Correspondence to Petri T. Niemelä.

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Communicated by M. Raymond

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Niemelä, P.T., Dingemanse, N.J. Trustworthiness of online beer ratings as a source of social information. Behav Ecol Sociobiol 71, 24 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00265-016-2254-4

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