A Rater‐Reader Inconsistency: Underjudging the Influence of Price in Consumer Ratings

ABSTRACT The reputation system enables prospective buyers to infer product quality without prior interactions with sellers or direct trials, subsequently shaping their purchase decisions. Across eight experiments ( N = 2898), the present research identifies a rater‐reader discrepancy in this inference process: prospective buyers underestimate the quality gap between high‐price/high‐quality products and low‐price/low‐quality products. This underjudgment can be so pronounced that readers may judge a high‐price/high‐quality product as inferior to a low‐price/low‐quality one, and this effect persists among consumers from different cultural backgrounds, among products that are utilitarian or hedonic, at different levels of complexity, and with or without qualification certificates. This discrepancy arises because raters are price‐sensitive; they evaluate quality relative to price, whereas prospective buyers (readers) are price‐insensitive, underweighting the impact of price information despite having access to it. Consequently, readers over‐rely on ratings as indicators of product quality. Consistent with our theory, the underjudgment effect diminishes among consumers less susceptible to social influence (Study 1), when price differences are smaller (Study 4), when readers are prompted to consider price effects (Study 5), and when readers are familiar with the products (Study 6) or have low trust in ratings as valid quality signals (Study A2). Our research contributes to the literature on social‐influence biases in online reviews, especially the understudied topics of interpersonal discrepancies between review creators and review readers.