Acta academica karviniensia 2022, 22(1):5-21 | DOI: 10.25142/aak.2022.001

WHAT COGNITIVE BIASES ATTACK POTENTIAL CUSTOMERS IN USER REVIEWS THE MOST?

Radka Bauerová, Tereza Ikášová, Veronika Kopřivová, Tomáš Pražák, Michal Stoklasa

Silesian University, School of Business Administration, Univerzitní nám. 1934/3, 733 40 Karviná

Reading reviews is a common activity for many potential customers when deciding to buy a product from a particular retailer. It is such a common activity that many of them may be unaware that they are influenced not only by the content of the review itself, but also by its style, display, length, and distinctiveness, with a particular cognitive bias behind each of these elements. This has an impact on their decision-making, which may ultimately be illogical. In reality, however, we are affected by hundreds of confirmed distortions that force us to think and act irrationally. If people are not always able to make rational decisions, then many of the economic assumptions need to be reviewed. The aim of this paper is therefore to uncover the cognitive biases that attack potential customers in user reviews and to determine their influence on e-shop popularity ratings. In order to accomplish the objective, a survey was conducted among the TOP 100 e-shops on the Czech market, from which were selected 70 e-shops to identify the most frequently occurring cognitive biases. In the first step, the heuristic method of observing e-shop websites was used. In the second step, a chi-square two-sample test was used to obtain results due to the nominal nature of the data under study. It was found that in terms of the user interface, the most emerging biases are bandwagon effect, apophenia, authority bias and social proof. Then, in the case of examining the reviews themselves, it was found that availability bias, story bias, processing difficulty effect, negativity effect and authority bias were determined to be the most likely to influence potential customers. Some of these biases were also found to affect the popularity ratings of the e-shop, which marketing managers should pay attention to because of the link between popularity and loyalty.

Keywords: apophenia, authority bias, bandwagon effect, e-shops, negativity effect, online reviews, processing difficulty effect, story bias.

JEL classification: C12, M30, M31

Received: November 19, 2021; Revised: January 19, 2022; Accepted: May 18, 2022; Published: May 25, 2022  Show citation