Objective vs. Online Ratings: Are Low Correlations Unexpected and Does It Matter? A Commentary on de Langhe, Fernbach, and Lichtenstein

The major point of the article by de Langhe, Fernbach, and Lichtenstein (2016, in this issue) is that objective ratings produced by Consumer Reports and online consumer ratings have a low correlation. We argue in this comment that this result is unsurprising due to some unresolved statistical issues, heterogeneity in terms of consumers. use of ratings and of the underlying consumer population and contexts, dynamics in the ratings system, and the complexity of modeling the generation of the consumer ratings. We also question why this low correlation matters given the fact that consumers use multiple sources of information, and more uncorrelated sources lead to more efficient decision making.