For money, and for fun: Exploring the effects of gamification and financial incentives on motivating online review generation

Online reviews can serve as an important strategy to counter and mitigate the negative effects of information asymmetry which can lead to selecting a sub-optimal product or the wrong product. Prior research has demonstrated that financial incentives can motivate online review generation. However, the literature has largely ignored the growing use of gamification to encourage online review generation. In this paper, we propose using a combination of gamification and financial incentives to stimulate online reviews. We employed a randomized experiment to compare the effectiveness of gamification and financial strategies to improve the quantity, the quality, and the valence of online reviews. We found that combining gamification and financial incentives leads to the largest volume of reviews. But the relationship between gamification/financial incentives and the quality of the online reviews was not statistically significant. The results also suggested that the underreporting issue, where potential reviewers do not review because of time constraints and the effort required, can be mitigated by providing gamification and financial incentives. This study has important theoretical and managerial implications.