Polished bad reviews good
By Bala Shah

Do you think any kind of bad review could help sell a product?  Panos Ipeirotis, who works as an Associate Professor at the Stern School of Business, New York, has the evidence that it does.  And some of the most popular ecommerce sites like Zappos polish the language of negative comments as it helps sales

Panos, who says he is interested in crowd sourcing and on leveraging economics to solve computer science problems, has blogged about his research

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A well-written review tends to inspire confidence about the product, even if the review is negative. Typically, such reviews are perceived as objective and thorough. If we have a high-quality negative review this may serve as a guarantee that the negative aspects of the product are not that bad after all. For example, a negative review, such as "horrible battery life... in my tests battery lasts barely longer than 24 hours," may be perceived as positive by other customers that consider a 24-hour battery life to be more than sufficient.

In our recent (award-winning) WWW2011 paper "Towards a Theory Model for Product Search", we noticed that demand for a hotel increases if the reviews on TripAdvisor and Travelocity are well-written, without spelling errors; this holds no matter if the review is positive or negative.

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Zappos has been using crowd sourcing to fix spelling and grammar errors of negative reviews as it actually helps sales