Star Ratings versus Sentiment Analysis -- A Comparison of Explicit and Implicit Measures of Opinions

A typical trade-off in decision making is between the cost of acquiring information and the decline in decision quality caused by insufficient information. Consumers regularly face this trade-off in purchase decisions. Online product/service reviews serve as sources of product/service related information. Meanwhile, modern technology has led to an abundance of such content, which makes it prohibitively costly (if possible at all) to exhaust all available information. Consumers need to decide what subset of available information to use. Star ratings are excellent cues for this decision as they provide a quick indication of the tone of a review. However there are cases where such ratings are not available or detailed enough. Sentiment analysis -text analytic techniques that automatically detect the polarity of text- can help in these situations with more refined analysis. In this study, we compare sentiment analysis results with star ratings in three different domains to explore the promise of this technique.