Review Manipulation: Literature Review, and Future Research Agenda

Background: The phenomenon of review manipulation and fake reviews has gained Information Systems (IS) scholars’ attention during recent years. Scholarly research in this domain has delved into the causes and consequences of review manipulation. However, we find that the findings are diverse, and the studies do not portray a systematic approach. This study synthesizes the findings from a multidisciplinary perspective and presents an integrated framework to understand the mechanism of review manipulation. Method: The study reviews 88 relevant articles on review manipulation spanning a decade and a half. We adopted an iterative coding approach to synthesizing the literature on concepts and categorized them independently into potential themes. Results: We present an integrated framework that shows the linkages between the different themes, namely, the prevalence of manipulation, impact of manipulation, conditions and choice for manipulation decision, characteristics of fake reviews, models for detecting spam reviews, and strategies to deal with manipulation. We also present the characteristics of review manipulation and cover both operational and conceptual issues associated with the research on this topic. Conclusions: Insights from the study will guide future research on review manipulation and fake reviews. The study presents a holistic view of the phenomenon of review manipulation. It informs various online platforms to address fake reviews towards building a healthy and sustainable environment

Reputation Systems: A framework for attacks and frauds classification

Reputation and recommending systems have been widely used in e-commerce, as well as online collaborative networks, P2P networks and many other contexts, in order to provide trust to the participants involved in the online interaction. Based on a reputation score, the e-commerce user feels a sense of security, leading the person to trust or not when buying or selling. However, these systems may give the user a false sense of security due to their gaps. This article discusses the limitations of the current reputation systems in terms of models to determine the reputation score of the users. We intend to contribute to the knowledge in this field by providing a systematic overview of the main types of attack and fraud found in those systems, proposing a novel framework of classification based on a matrix of attributes. We believe such a framework could help analyse new types of attacks and fraud. Our work was based on a systematic literature review methodology.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio