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Anomalous Reviews Owing to Referral Incentive

Published: 31 July 2017 Publication History

Abstract

In an online review system, a user writes a review with the intention of helping fellow consumers (i.e. the readers) to make informed decisions. However, product owners often provide incentives (e.g. coupons, bonus points, referral rewards) to the writers, motivating the writing of biased reviews. These biased reviews, while beneficial for both writers and product owners, pollute the review space and destroy readers' trust significantly. In this paper, we analyze incentivized reviews in the Google Play store and identify a wide range of anomalous review types such as copying, spamming, advertising, and hidden-beneficiary reviews. We also find an increasing trend in the number of apps being targeted by abusers, which, if continued, will render review systems as crowd advertising platforms rather than an unbiased source of helpful information.

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Cited By

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  • (2022)What makes an online review credible? A systematic review of the literature and future research directionsManagement Review Quarterly10.1007/s11301-022-00312-674:2(627-659)Online publication date: 5-Dec-2022
  • (2019)BotCamp: Bot-driven Interactions in Social CampaignsThe World Wide Web Conference10.1145/3308558.3313420(2529-2535)Online publication date: 13-May-2019

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cover image ACM Conferences
ASONAM '17: Proceedings of the 2017 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining 2017
July 2017
698 pages
ISBN:9781450349932
DOI:10.1145/3110025
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 31 July 2017

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View all
  • (2022)What makes an online review credible? A systematic review of the literature and future research directionsManagement Review Quarterly10.1007/s11301-022-00312-674:2(627-659)Online publication date: 5-Dec-2022
  • (2019)BotCamp: Bot-driven Interactions in Social CampaignsThe World Wide Web Conference10.1145/3308558.3313420(2529-2535)Online publication date: 13-May-2019

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