Across many industries, individuals are increasingly relying on customer ratings and reviews on social media. While customer reviews often provide detailed diagnostic information about experiences, customer ratings often reduce the experience down to a simple number. Moreover, there is evidence to support that customer rating inflation is occurring on social media sites over time, especially in the sharing economy, and especially with regard to travel and tourism experiences. This paper conceptualizes how customer experiences are reduced into customer reviews and further abridged into customer ratings in both the traditional and sharing economy contexts. We propose that customers observe how service providers present themselves as a professional (established chain hotel) or amateur (owner operated vacation rental apartment), and then form different service expectations and perceptions accordingly. We investigate 55,110 customer reviews and ratings of New York City’s accommodation providers and indeed find evidence of rating inflation over the eight years studied.

在许多行业中，个人越来越依赖社交媒体上的客户评级和评论. 虽然客户评论通常提供关于体验的详细诊断信息，但客户评级通常将体验降低到一个简单的数字. 此外，有证据表明，随着时间的推移，社交媒体网站上的客户评级通胀正在发生，尤其是在共享经济中，尤其是在旅游和旅游体验方面. 本文从概念上阐述了在传统经济和共享经济环境下，如何将顾客体验简化为顾客评价，并进一步简化为顾客评价. 我们建议客户观察服务提供商如何将自己定位为专业（已建立的连锁酒店）或业余（业主经营的度假租赁公寓），然后据此形成不同的服务期望和感知. 我们调查了55110个客户评论和纽约市住宿供应商的评级，确实发现了在研究的八年里通货膨胀评级的证据.