MKTG 556 | Session 8 | Guardians of Trust: How Review Platforms Can Fight Fakery and Build Consumer Trust

MKTG 556 | Session 7 | Guardians of Trust: How Review Platforms Can Fight Fakery and Build Consumer Trust - 2024 Ben B. Beck, Stefan Wuyts, and Sandy Jap Introduction: This research investigates how online review platforms can serve as "guardians of trust" in an era of widespread misinformation and fake reviews. Drawing on governance and identity-disclosure literature, it proposes five mechanisms—monitoring, exposure, community building, status endowment, and identity disclosure—that help reduce fakery and foster consumer trust in these platforms. Through five complementary studies, it demonstrates how these practices both individually and collectively enhance trust, identify mediating processes (such as reducing perceived firm opportunism and increasing reviewer credibility), and confirm ecological and managerial relevance. Importantly, the authors find that certain governance mechanisms (e.g., exposure, community building, status endowment) can substitute for identity disclosure, providing privacy-preserving options for trust building.