Viewing profile — gzervas

Hi, co-author of the paper here. To answer your question, yes, there is evidence to suggest that targeted ads work better: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=160025…

That's why we checked whether advertisers are getting preferential filtering treatment. (They aren't according to our data.) Read my previous comment, or better yet read the paper …

While I read such anecdotes, I cannot rely much on them for research. Instead, what we did for our paper was to collect thousands of filtered reviews, and check their characteristi…

If there exists a material connection between the owner and the reviewer which is not disclosed in the review then the FTC considers this to be deceptive advertising. A material co…

We'd love to incorporate your data in our analysis if you are willing to share.

While I agree with you about the title of the article, it is not true at all that "all non-removed reviews are assumed, in the data, to be real." In fact, in our analysis we explic…

(Mostly answering to the deleted grandparent here.) "In the meantime, they benefit from charging businesses to allow positive reviews to appear and to suppress negative reviews (if…

I don't know what goes into Yelp's filter either. I also agree that it can make mistakes. At the same time, I do think that the filter is more likely to catch a fake review than it…

Hi everyone, co-author of the paper here. I wanted to clarify the 20% figure. We actually have no way of telling how many, or which reviews are fake. We do not directly observe rev…

Are you saying it's Yelp's responsibility to protect unsophisticated users from themselves? Also, I am not quite sure "a lot of people" will behave as you describe.

True, Yelp got the filtering completely backwards in this instance. But, do you base any economic decision on two 5-star reviews from two Yelpers with 0 friends and 4 reviews combi…

You're right, statistical significance is a valid concern but error bars is not the way to go. Check the paper for a rigorous analysis. We are not drawing our conclusions from a si…