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Purpose To influence consumer perceptions, firms often manipulate online product reviews on their own websites or third-party forums by anonymously adding positive reviews, deleting unfavorable reviews or offering rewards to encourage favorable reviews. This study aims to investigate consumer perceptions of online review deceptions and how these perceptions influence their subsequent purchase behavior. In particular, consumers’ awareness, suspicion and detection are studied and specific manipulation tactics are evaluated. Design/methodology/approach Both qualitative and quantitative studies are relied upon to understand consumer perceptions of online review deceptions. In-depth interviews with 16 experienced online shoppers were conducted to collect the illustrative accounts concerning consumer awareness of online review deceptions, their suspicion, detection and evaluation of different manipulation tactics. A survey of 199 consumers was then followed to validate and corroborate the findings from the qualitative study and generalize the interview results onto the general public. Findings The results from in-depth interviews suggest that consumers take a negative view toward online review deceptions, but the degree of negativity varies across different manipulation tactics. Moreover, different types of manipulations vary in terms of perceived deceptiveness, ease of detection and unethicality, as well as their effect on consumer purchase intention and perceived helpfulness of online product reviews. The findings from the survey further confirmed the qualitative findings. Practical implications The findings have a number of meaningful managerial implications for industry associations and policymakers on whether and how to regulate online review deceptions. Originality/value This study applies and extends information manipulation theory and deception detection literature to an online context to increase the richness of the relevant theories. It is among the first to empirically investigate online review deceptions from a consumer’s perspective, as opposed to a firm’s perspective as previous studies have done.

In light of the critical role of price information in consumers’ decision making, this study investigates the effect of price rank on consumers’ responses to product list advertising (PLA). The research documents that the price rank is more influential than actual price for PLA. In addition, the research highlights a tradeoff in price-rank decisions: A price rank that drives more clicks does not necessarily lead to more conversions; to drive traffic, managers should strive for an extreme (i.e., either high or low) to elicit more clicks, then follow up with online engagement tools (e.g., cross-selling and product recommendations). To maximize direct revenue, managers instead should strive for moderate ranks to satisfy consumers’ desire for a compromise between price and quality. However, consumers without uncertainty tend to rely less on price rank, so the effects diminish among specific keywords and increase among popular keywords. In order to achieve the desired price ranks, firms participating in PLA might monitor and adjust their advertising offers. There are commonly two specific avenues: Change the product price if the required change is within a certain range or change the advertised product if the required price change is beyond a certain range.

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