Assortment planning with trustworthy reviews

The article considers the assortment planning problem with respect to trustworthy reviewers. The trustworthiness of the product review and rating is based on whether the reviewer is rational or irrational. The average review ratings and comments are affected by the average trustworthiness. On the other hand, consumers have attention spans, i.e., the maximum number of products they are willing to view and inspect sequentially before purchasing a product or leaving the platform empty-handed when the attention span gets exhausted. The current paper provides an assortment planning model that maximizes revenue while considering trustworthy online product reviews as the quality by considering a threshold number of reviews and prices. This, in turn, is expected to minimize the information asymmetry within the decision-making process and identify the paid reviewers or manipulative reviews.