Trojan Horses in Amazon's Castle: Understanding the Incentivized Online Reviews

During the past few years, sellers have increasingly offered discounted or free products to selected reviewers of e-commerce platforms in exchange for their reviews. Such incentivized (and often very positive) reviews can improve the rating of a product which in turn sways other users' opinions about the product. Despite their importance, the prevalence, characteristics, and the influence of incentivized reviews in a major e-commerce platform have not been systematically and quantitatively studied. This paper examines the problem of detecting and characterizing incentivized reviews in two primary categories of Amazon products. We describe a new method to identify Explicitly Incentivized Reviews (EIRs) and then collect a few datasets to capture an extensive collection of EIRs along with their associated products and reviewers. We show that the key features of EIRs and normal reviews exhibit different characteristics. Furthermore, we illustrate how the prevalence of EIRs has evolved and been affected by Amazon's ban. Our examination of the temporal pattern of submitted reviews for sample products reveals promotional campaigns by the corresponding sellers and their effectiveness in attracting other users. Finally, we demonstrate that a classifier that is trained by EIRs (without explicit keywords) and normal reviews can accurately detect other EIRs as well as implicitly incentivized reviews. Overall, this analysis sheds an insightful light on the impact of EIRs on Amazon products and users.