Don’t Want Negative Reviews? Pay to Have Them Removed
We have posted previously about business entities that try to go after customers that give them negative reviews here and here. It seems, based on our limited experience, that threatening to sue customers for writing negative reviews is not a great business model.
Fortunately, there is a market solution. As reported in this weekend’s column in The New York Times‘s “The Ethicist,” businesses that recieve negative online reviews can just contact the reviewers and pay them to take down the review. According to the account in The Times, the author of a TripAdvisor review of a hotel entitled it “An Overpriced Dung Heap,” but then accepted a 50% discount in return for removing the review. He should have bargained down to “Dung Heap,” since the hotel probably was still a dung heap but perhaps was no longer overpriced.
The reviewer asked The Ethicist who was most unethical: himself, the hotel or TripAdvisor for hosting a system so easily corrupted. We don’t get paid to weigh in on ethical matters. Actually, we don’t get paid at all. But we do have opinions to vent, so here are some.
As The Ethicist acknowledged, what the hotel owner did was not illegal. An economist might reduce the question to one of efficiency. If the hotel owner thinks her money is well spent making bad publicity go away, rather than actually improving the quality of her hotel, that is a choice she can make as a business owner. The market may prove her wrong. The lack of negative reviews on TripAdvisor may not help if in fact one is greeted by a kickline of cockroaches and bedbugs when entering the guest rooms. The Ethicist dodges the stickier problem that TripAdvisor may contain only positive reviews of The Dung Heap Inn because the owners and their supporters flood the site with fake reviews. One would think that TripAdvisor’s value would be correlated to its accuracy, but it is hard to see what measure TripAdvisor could take to insure that posts on its site are the real deal.