Research Talk by Hana Choi, University of Rochester (US)

As part of the Marketing Research Seminar Series, Hana Choi presented her work on a question that feels very current in e-commerce: when retailers send out review solicitations, do they actually bring in reviews where they would matter most? Using panel data from a large apparel retailer, she showed that solicitations tend to generate reviews precisely in situations where prior reviews are already plentiful, while doing very little in the low-information settings where an extra review would help future buyers the most. The downstream effects are not small either,  an additional review in the right moment can reduce return rates by up to 11.9%. A counterfactual exercise put a concrete number on this misalignment, suggesting that closing even part of the gap could meaningfully increase revenue per solicitation sent.

What stood out for me as a PhD student was how the talk linked something as ordinary as a review request email to a deeper behavioral story about why early reviews are so hard to get. It was a good reminder that aggregate review counts can hide a lot, and that modeling both reviewers and buyers separately can surface frictions that a more standard approach would miss. The discussion afterwards was lively, especially around the idea of the early-review barrier and how much it shapes what later buyers end up seeing.