Most products and services now allow users to leave reviews and ratings of them, so there is an understandable desire among service providers to secure a good rating, especially as previous research suggests that such user-generated feedback is often more persuasive than other forms of marketing collateral.

Research from Sungkyunkwan University shows how the position of an offering in the review listings can be incredibly powerful, with this positioning often overcoming otherwise crucial information about the product that would ordinarily guide our decision-making.

“We find that ranking helps only those in the top spot, and the rest suffer from it,” the researchers say. “The implications of this can be found in almost every corner of society, because ranking is practically everywhere—movies, novels, cars, vacuum cleaners, even academic institutions such as universities are typically ranked.”

Buyer behavior

The researchers conducted several experiments involving around 3,600 participants, who were asked to analyze historical sports data before making various decisions.  For instance, in one experiment, the volunteers were given 70 years worth of data on NBA players who had made the all-NBA team chosen by sports journalists each year.  Alongside the selections, the volunteers had data on things such as their win shares and their individual performance metrics, both individually and relative to other players in the league.

The experiment found that those who ranked first in the league rankings for points, assists, rebounds, and so on, were much more likely to find their way into the all-NBA team compared to peers with similar stats but who were not first in any of the categories.

Other experiments explored how such rankings affect our behaviors and choices in a wider range of scenarios, such as choosing a restaurant to frequent.  As before, the options at the top of the rating league table were far more likely to be chosen than their more lowly ranked peers, even if their features are largely identical.

The ranking effect

The researchers suggest that this ranking effect could be in part because people tend to spend more time researching and reading about the products and services of the top-ranked item.  This disproportionate amount of time and attention allows us to better understand the strengths of this option, but often under-estimating or even ignoring the strengths of the other options.

“Ranking makes us focus only on those at the top of the hierarchy and disregard the rest,” the researchers explain.

There are obvious benefits to ranking items, but the researchers highlight the drawbacks of the approach too.  While they can help us to make sense of what is often overwhelming amounts of information, they can also lead us to overlook what could be crucial information and even to make less-than-optimal decisions.