Statistics and customer ratings

[find_the_fun]

When conducting a survey it is poor choice to only solicit the survey to people who feel like taking it. This is a bad idea because a person who goes out of their way to do a survey may be different than the rest of the population in some respect thus their answer is biased. I know this is elementary, but what is the name of this concept?

Anyways my point: online retailers such as Amazon.com must have non-representative customer ratings since only people who feel like it (probably because they had a really good or really bad experience) choose x amount of stars. Is there anyway around this aside from giving people incentives like money if they fill out a survey?

 

[I like Serena]

Re: Statistics and customer raitings

When conducting a survey it is poor choice to only solicit the survey to people who feel like taking it. This is a bad idea because a person who goes out of their way to do a survey may be different than the rest of the population in some respect thus their answer is biased. I know this is elementary, but what is the name of this concept?

It's called bias, or more specifically selection or selection bias.

Anyways my point: online retailers such as Amazon.com must have non-representative customer ratings since only people who feel like it (probably because they had a really good or really bad experience) choose x amount of stars. Is there anyway around this aside from giving people incentives like money if they fill out a survey?

I believe the important thing is to be aware of it, and preferably to include the number of participants that took the survey versus the ones that didn't in a report.