You can’t buy my rating! On the pivotal effect of an unconditional gift on rating behavior

The importance of online ratings on sales is widely acknowledged. Firms need to find ways of increasing the number of ratings and rating scores, but how they can achieve this effectively is less well established. In this paper we analyze the impact of an unconditional gift on customers’ rating behavior in an online field experiment. Contrary to prevalent advice, our results suggest that providing a gift is not necessarily beneficial. Younger customers are significantly less likely to rate when exposed to an unconditional gift. Regression analysis reveals that age serves as a moderator and older customers even respond slightly positive to a gift. Having detected a negative effect of gifts on rating behavior provides first indicative evidence of a possible crowding out of intrinsic motivation in the context of online ratings. This has direct implications for practitioners considering the usage of gifts to elicit online ratings.