Missing Impact of Ratings on Platform Participation in India: A Call for Research in GREAT Domains
Authors: Prasanna P. Karhade and Abhishek Kathuria
Abstract
The objective of this study is to propose research conducted in western, educated, industrialised, rich and democratic (W.E.I.R.D.) domains does not necessarily generalise to the rest of the world. Growing, rural, eastern, aspirational, transitional (G.R.E.A.T) domains now account for a significant proportion of world economic output, thereby warranting special attention. We submit that a tolerant stance under which scholars investigate G.R.E.A.T. domains with an open mind that allows for theoretical plurality is likely to enrich IS theories. As an exemplar of this stance, we consider how online ratings affect rate decisions to participate in financial transactions on a digital platform in a G.R.E.A.T. economy. The production and consumption of food affects every strata of society and thus, we choose to investigate our research question in the context of platform-enabled food delivery. We apply decision tree induction on a population level dataset of restaurants, their features, online ratings, and financial participation decisions from a major food discovery and delivery platform in India. Tree induction makes no distributional assumptions and makes no priority assumptions on the combinations of factors, thereby enabling us to put forth the most lenient test for uncovering any impact of online ratings on the decisions tacitly made by rates. After conducting multiple computational experiments, we consistently find that online restaurant ratings did not have a significant bearing on their decision to participate on the food delivery platform. Our counter intuitive finding serves as an exemplar of a W.E.I.R.D. domain logic that does not generalise to a G.R.E.A.T. domain and forms a credible basis for our call for additional research in G.R.E.A.T. domains.
Citation: Karhade, P., and Kathuria, A. “Missing Impact of Ratings on Platform Participation in India: A Call for Research in G. R. E. A. T. Domains,” forthcoming, Communications of the Association for Information Systems [CAIS].
Keywords: Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic (WEIRD) Domains, Growing, Rural, Eastern, Aspirational, Transitional (GREAT) Domains, Digital Platforms, Online Ratings, Food Delivery, India.
