Crowd Voting: Impacts on Product Sales in Marketplaces

Abstract

In the current time of information, we live in times that the expectations of thinkers as Lévy (1998) have become a reality. The profile of the consumer has changed as he connected with other consumers and begun to demand that there is a dialogue between the company and society. This new scenario required that technology was further developed and that the process of communication was made faster by means of online platforms that make the exchange of information viable and encourages it. The crowdsourcing arose with the availability of the crowd’s intellectual capital that has changed the way companies interact and organize themselves as they come to realize the strategic importance of this information. In order to fully understand this new scenario, we have created three hypothesis that have served as guide for this paper, which are: H1 – Crowdsourcing affects products’ performance; H2 – negative reviews from crowd voting provide the same effects that positive reviews; and H3- Crowd voting provides information about consumer`s perception of the product being offered. Therefore, this paper aims to understand if the crowdsourcing affects product’s performance of the companies that use crowdsourcing by analyzing the theoretical basis of crowdsourcing and also by reviewing a data-base with reviews made by consumers during a four-year period. Based on the review of the correlations between the variables obtained in Amazon’s data base based on the reviews offered by the consumers, this work suggests that the crowdsourcing does affect the product’s performance.