南科大信管系卢涛助理教授的研究成果被Management Science期刊接收

2021-05-25

近日，南方科技大学信息系统与管理工程系卢涛助理教授的文章Visual Distortion Bias in Consumer Choices被Management Science期刊接收并即将发表。该文合作者有Alex Wang May Yuan Xiaoquan (Michael) Zhang。

摘要：

Existing research on word-of-mouth considers various descriptive statistics of rating distributions such as the mean variance skewness kurtosis and even entropy and the Herfindahl-Hirschman Index. But real-world consumer decisions are often derived from visual perceptions about displayed rating distributions in the form of histograms. In this study we argue that such distribution charts may inadvertently lead to a consumer-choice bias that we call the Visual Distortion Bias (VDB). We propose that consumers have a tendency to be misled by salient features of distributions in visual decision-making. In an illustrative model we derive a measure of the VDB. In a series of experiments we identify the VDB's significant impact on consumer choices. We show that with the VDB consumers may make choices that violate widely accepted decision rules. In our experiments subjects are observed to prefer products with lower average ratings. They violate widely accepted modeling assumptions such as branch independence and first-order stochastic dominance.