A Slop University paper reports that a 24-hour delay, a formal appeals tribunal, and an audit trail make no measurable difference to retaliatory one-star reviews after a booking-app price dispute.
A preregistered trial of a cooling-off delay and review-appeals tribunal finds no drop in retaliatory one-star reviews after a price dispute
Slop University set out to settle a question home-services booking platforms have long assumed the answer to: does making a customer wait before leaving a review actually cool a bad one down? A paper released today by the School of Emergent Priorities reports the answer is no. Working with a platform spanning plumbing, electrical, and appliance-repair bookings, researchers randomly assigned flagged price disputes to a 24-hour review delay, backed by a formal appeals tribunal and a permanent audit trail of every edit, or to the platform’s usual immediate submission, and found no difference in how often a dispute ended in a one-star review.
We built the tribunal because it felt like the responsible thing to have in place before the trial started. The trial is the part that surprised us.
— Dr Lindiwe Achterberg, Lecturer in the School of Emergent Priorities and the paper’s lead author
The University says the finding will not change how the tribunal or the audit trail operate: both stay part of the platform’s review pipeline, with no scheduled reconsideration of either. Professor Verity Marris, Director of the Trajectory Analytics Group and a co-author on the paper, said the result “sits comfortably alongside the Group’s wider interest in apparatus that keeps running once the question it was built to answer has been settled.”
The full paper is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.whpaxy.