

Ranking crowdsourced data with curves - timcederman
http://www.cederman.com/?p=116

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ojbyrne
As someone who works (sort of) for Tripadvisor, I found this interesting. I'm
a little suspect that "Since I changed tactics, I have been having great hotel
experiences." is confirmation bias, though.

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timcederman
Maybe. I had a string of pretty crappy hotels, so started paying more
attention to the reviews and noticed that although the hotels I had been
staying at had higher averages, they had a lot less 5 star ratings. Next few
hotels were much better, and when the option to get a hotel with a better
curve wasn't available, I was appropriately disappointed. While I would like
to think that I don't suffer from confirmation bias, this certainly isn't a
double blind trial.

I have also seen a similar phenomenon with restaurants on Yelp though, which
has been slightly easier to test in that I can try two similar restaurants
with the different shaped curves.

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greendestiny
I tried a similar approach with the netflix prize, although in that case I
fitted truncated normal distributions to the data.

