Wulff,D.U.
Hills,T.T.
Hertwig,R.

People can access information about choices in at least two ways: via summary descriptions that provide an overview of potential outcomes and their likelihood of occurrence or via sequential presentation of outcomes. Provided with the former, people make decisions from descrip- tion; with the latter, they make decisions from experience. Recent investigations involving risky choices have demonstrated a robust and sys- tematic description–experience gap. Specifically, when people make decisions from experience, rare events tend to have less impact than what they deserve according to their objective probability. Here, we show that this description–experience gap generalizes from choices involving monetary gambles to choices based on (hypothetical) online product ratings. We further show that causes that have been identified in the con- text of risky choice also contribute to the description–experience gap in choice based on online product ratings: reliance on relatively small samples of information and overweighting of recently sampled information (recency). We conclude with a discussion of the practical impli- cations of our results and identify promising directions for cross-disciplinary investigations.

Wulff, D. U., Hills, T. T., & Hertwig, R. (2015). Online product reviews and the description-experience gap. Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, 28, 214-223. doi:10.1002/bdm.1841 (Full text)

Publication year	2015
Document type:	Article
Publication status:	Published
External URL:	http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/bdm.1841 View
Categories:
Keywords:	amazonbehaviorconceives consumer choice asdecisions under uncertaintydemanddescriptiondescription–experience gapeexperience gapginformation searchmarshallianneoclassical theory of consumeronline consumer ratingsword of mouth