Whose Voice Do We Hear in the Marketplace? Evidence from Consumer Complaining Behavior

Consumer voice has increasingly become a major factor in the marketplace through consumer complaints, but little is known about who chooses to complain and how complainants compare with consumers of the product. Any differences in complaint rates across groups can reflect either different propensities to complain or different consumer experiences, making it difficult to assess the degree of self-selection. I utilize a set of law enforcement actions to separate these two explanations by comparing characteristics of complaining consumers to those of victims, and I find much lower complaint rates in heavily minority areas compared with nonminority areas, relative to their respective victimization rates. I find evidence against information-based accounts for why victims from minority areas are less likely to complain and in favor of explanations related to lower levels of trust or general social capital. I then provide a statistical weighting approach to remedy the problem of self-selection and apply it to develop an implied victimization rate using complaints from the Consumer Sentinel database.