Consumer Behavior Paradox

I have just received the October issue of Harvard Business Review. Here is one teaser I found entertaining. Gavan J. Fitzsimons of Duke University and Donald R. Lehmann of Columbia University found that 71% of people selected a product they favored after reading a positive review and 93% of people selected a product after reading a negative review. It is easy to come to a counter-intuitive conclusion: the better product review is, the less likely the product is selected. There is still space for misinterpretation of the results since events are not really mutually exclusive and the order how reviews were presented matter.