EXPLORING THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN AMAZON BADGES AND STAR RATINGS IN ONLINE REVIEWS

This thesis investigates the relationship between three Amazon badges (Vine Voice, Vine Customer of a Free Product, and Verified Purchase) and the star ratings. The status and incentives associated with badges pose a concern of credibility in online reviews. This thesis examines whether the Vine Voice badge and Vine Review of a Free Product badge are more likely to have higher star ratings, and whether the Verified Purchase badge is more likely to have lower star ratings. Amazon reviews on two different battery products were manually collected and parsed to extract variables relevant to the research question. An ordinal logistic regression model analysis found that the Verified Purchase had a statistically significant negative relationship with star ratings but failed to find any evidence of a statistically significant relationship between the Vine Voice badge or the Vine Review of a Free Product badge and star ratings.