Maslowska selected as Center for Advanced Study Associate for 2024-25 academic year
Ewa Maslowska, associate professor of advertising, was selected as a Center for Advanced Study Associate for the 2024-25 academic year, pending Board of Trustees approval.
As a CAS Associate, Maslowska will take time off from teaching in Fall 2024 to focus on her research of fake online reviews.
Consumer reviews on many e-commerce and travel websites, social media platforms, and entertainment pages have been shown to play a crucial role in consumers’ purchase decisions. As a result, companies started motivating consumers to write reviews by providing various incentives. However, there’s been little research on the process of review generation or review perception, depending on the different levels of review incentives.
Maslowska said her project “aims to investigate how incentives affect reviewers’ motivations and their reviews.” She also plans “to identify textual markers of incentivized and fake reviews and investigate whether it’s possible to train consumers to recognize such reviews, or at least make them more skeptical about them.”
Maslowska, who also serves as faculty lead of the computer science + advertising degree program in the Charles H. Sandage Department of Advertising, was appointed a CAS Associate in the Spring 2024 semester upon the recommendation of CAS professors and with concurrence of campus and university administrations.
CAS Associates are tenured Illinois faculty members whose project proposals are selected in an annual competition. They are granted one semester of teaching release to pursue an individual scholarly or creative project.
The Center for Advanced Study works with every department on campus to identify and support the most productive, high-achieving, and innovative faculty at Illinois, providing them with connections and funding to pursue their work. Members of this accomplished community are invited to participate in CAS activities throughout the year and given opportunities to present their work to the CAS community. See CAS’s upcoming events.
—Kelly Youngblood