The Weekend Effect in Online Reviews

For your marketing

Possible founder application

If review volume matters, test request timing and compare response rate and rating distribution. Avoid interpreting a weekend average as evidence that customers or product quality change on weekends.

Reported result

What the study found

Weekend reviews averaged about 0.04 stars lower; a negative pattern appeared on 26 of 33 platforms. The authors identify temporal self-selection as a major mechanism and report that weekend review requests can collect more negative ratings.

Research question

What the authors investigated

Do online reviews differ by day of week, and does the timing of a review request affect the ratings collected?

Design

Analysis of review data across platforms, fixed-effects and natural-experiment analyses, plus review-solicitation studies including a preregistered field experiment.

Sample and setting

Nearly 400 million reviews across 33 platforms, more than 20 million reviewed items and over 60 million users; categories include products, travel, employers, entertainment, and professional services.

Scope and transfer

Limitations to keep in view

Platform data and review-solicitation experiments do not establish the best request schedule for every business. Some solicitation studies had low power, and the platforms span heterogeneous categories; ratings are not equivalent to revenue or customer quality.

Research sources

SAGE publisher abstract and full article page retrieved with Firecrawl. Access class remains abstract-level in this directory profile.