First-Mover Advantage in Online Review Platform

While first-mover advantage has been widely studied at firm-level, our research focuses on individual-level first-mover advantage in online review platform. More specifically, we study whether early reviews receive higher proportion of helpful votes than later reviews. We try to answer three questions. (1) Does first-mover have advantage in online review platform? (2) Does the first-mover advantage differs across different types of reviewers? (3) Are reputation-seeking reviewers more likely to exploit the first-move advantage? We analyze the model using Zero-inflated Beta with the review data from Amazon.com. Our preliminary results show that early reviews are perceived more helpful than later reviews when controlling for total time being posted, review characteristics, and reviewer characteristics. The first-mover advantage is greater for high frequency reviewer than low frequency reviewer