评论文字能提前预示评分变化,揭示平台评分系统隐藏信息。
Review Text as a Leading Indicator of Displayed Reputation in Platform Rating Systems: Evidence from 34 U.S. Short-Term Rental Markets
- 用历史评论构建情感指数,分析其对评分变动的预测力。
- 过去评论更积极的房源,未来一年评分显著上升。
- 适合关注平台评价机制设计的研究者和从业者。
住宿平台的评分系统普遍存在评分趋近完美的问题,导致评分难以区分优劣。本文探讨用户已写下的评论文字是否仍蕴含可利用信息。基于跨34个美国短租市场的超20万条房源数据,构建包含完整评论历史的情感指数,通过两波面板数据检验。研究在预先锁定模型与验证方法后,保留一半市场用于独立验证。结果显示,过往评论情感越温暖的房源,未来一年显示评分有微小但精确的上升趋势;无新评论的房源则无此变化,该关联在控制房东固定效应后依然成立,且非由单一市场驱动。表明平台评分聚合过程忽略了其评论文本中保留的信息。结果暗示了声誉展示设计需考虑文本的前瞻性价值。情感指数为基于词典定义的工具,未经过人工判断验证,特此声明。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Rating systems on accommodation platforms suffer from a familiar problem: nearly every listing displays a nearly perfect score, so the number that is supposed to separate good listings from bad ones barely varies. Whether the review text accumulating beneath those scores still carries usable information is an open question. I ask a dynamic version of it: does the text guests have already written predict where a listing's displayed rating moves next? Treating text and ratings as parallel channels that aggregate guest experience at different speeds, I construct a prespecified sentiment index from the complete review history of each listing in a two-wave panel of more than two hundred thousand listings across 34 U.S. markets. Because the broader project had explored these data before, I locked the model and its falsification checks in advance and reserved half of the markets, untouched, for a single confirmatory estimation. On those held-out markets, warmer past text predicts a small but precisely estimated upward movement of the displayed rating over the following year. Listings that received no new reviews show no such movement, the association survives host fixed effects, and no single market drives it. The results indicate that the platform's rating aggregation discards information its own review text retains. I discuss what this leading-indicator property implies for the design of reputation displays. The text index is a defined dictionary-based instrument that has not been validated against human judgment, and I state that boundary plainly.
Thank you to arXiv for use of its open access interoperability. PaperDance 不是 arXiv 官方产品;中文卡片由大模型生成,请以原文为准。