We were commissioned by the Department for Business and Trade (DBT) to carry out a project to examine the prevalence of fake reviews on e-commerce platforms widely used in the UK, the impact of fake reviews on consumer decision-making, and the potential effectiveness of a non-regulatory intervention in negating such an effect.

In order to determine prevalence of fake reviews, we drew on market share and online traffic data to develop a basket of goods from 11 online marketplaces, used web-scraping technology to build an anonymised dataset of reviews and applied machine learning techniques to spot fake reviews. Subsequently, to assess the impact of fake reviews and the effectiveness of a non-regulatory intervention, we created and launched an online shopping experiment among nearly 5000 UK adults. Through the experiment, we were able to gain an in-depth understanding of how a consumer shops online through tracking and analysing behaviour across the platform

Through our research, we found that at least 10% of all product reviews on third-party e-commerce platforms are likely to be fake. Consumers are more susceptible to being misled by well-written fake reviews when purchasing products where reviews play a more prominent role in consumer decisions (such as consumer electronics or higher-priced products). This highlights the importance of taking steps to reduce the prevalence of online fake product reviews.

The executive summary and full report can be found here.