Determining the utility and veracity of online product reviews: the Consumer Review Evaluation Model (CREM)

When shopping online consumers are frequently confronted with fake reviews. The consequences for the consumers are purchasing flawed, low-quality or even dangerous products. Therefore, to develop effective countermeasures, we need to understand how consumers use reviews and identify fake reviews when making product choices. Thus far, attempts to develop theories about fake review identification have been based on laboratory or retrospective studies. Therefore, we used thinking-aloud methodology to more directly observe consumer decision-making regarding the evaluation of consumer reviews. We observed that participants use consumer reviews as a source of information about products. In this process, reviews were evaluated in three steps; first, relevance; second, the reviewer’s credibility; and lastly, the veracity of the review content. During each evaluation participants alternated between heuristic and conscious processing of deception cues, such as wording, depending on the level of suspicion they trigger. If an evaluation indicated that a review is irrelevant, unbelievable, or untrue, it was not used in the purchase decision process. We integrated our findings from the directly observed decision-making process with existing theory to create an overarching model of human fake review detection within the context of real shopping experiences.