Decision Making Based on Bimodal Rating Summary Statistics - An Eye-Tracking Study of Hotels

Rating-based summary statistics have become ubiquitous, and of key relevance to compare offers on booking platforms. Largely left unexplored, however, is the issue to what extent the descriptives of rating distributions influence the decision making of online consumers. In this work a conjoint experiment was eye-tracked to explore how different attributes of these rating summarisations, such as the mean rating value, the bimodality of the ratings distribution as well as the overall number of ratings impact users' decision making. Furthermore, participants' maximising behavioural tendencies were analysed. Depending on their scores on Decision Difficulty, participants were guided by different patterns in their assessment of the characteristics of rating summarisations, and in the intensity of their exploration of different choice options.