The Psychology of paid reviewers: an experimental study of online reviewer needs and motivations

Online shopping platforms use review systems to encourage consumers to write online reviews, often with incentives. While the strategic benefits of online reviews are evident, the impact of incentives on consumer motivation and review quality remains complex. Incentive disclosures with different IT artefacts and negative product experiences complicate the landscape for understanding consumer motivation to write an online review. Consumers may be driven by money, recognition, enjoyment, venting, or moral obligation. Self-determination theory is adopted as a motivational lens to better understand the tensions that exist with incentives. A motivational model of online reviews is developed with three psychological needs—autonomy, competence, and relatedness; four motivational types—intrinsic, identified, introjected, and external; and online reviewer outcomes. An experiment with incentives, disclosure statements and badges, and negative (positive) product experiences reveals that needs fulfilment and motivational states mediate reviewer outcomes. While incentives influence review writing intention through external motivation, the disclosure badge and negative product experiences enhance review effort and affect through internalized forms of motivation—introjected, identified, and intrinsic motivations. Combining incentives and disclosure badges offers a promising strategy for eliciting meaningful reviews across varied product experiences.