Expert Product Reviews and Conflict of Interest

Many firms that produce expert product reviews benefit from increased sales of the products they review, resulting in a conflict of interest. We evaluate expert product reviews from a video game magazine owned by a game retailer. We find evidence of review inflation for lower‐quality games and in periods shortly following the release of a game's corresponding hardware. These results are consistent with theoretical predictions for a firm that optimizes the trade‐off between sales revenue and the reputational costs associated with biasing reviews.