Studies on Trust and Reputation in Peer-to-Peer Networks by researchers like Yao Wang and Julita Vassileva of the University of Saskatchewan, as well as Minaxi Gupta, Paul Judge, and Mostafa Ammar of the Georgia Institute of Technology found that the average consumer prefers and trusts reviews by peers over those by professional critics.

"Our experiments show that the system where peers communicate their experiences (recommendations) outperforms the system where peers do not communicate with each other and that a differentiated trust adds to the performance in terms of percentage of successful interactions."

Chou, Yu-kai. Actionable Gamification: Beyond Points, Badges, and Leaderboards (p. 101). Octalysis Media. Kindle Edition.