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The literature on online product reviews is based on the fundamental premise that reviews reduce search costs and increase consumer confidence in their purchase decisions.However,this premise has not been proven in the literature.To this end we conducted an experiment using an eye-tracking machine to measure the impact of online reviews on consumer information search costs and on decision confidence.We find that both editorial reviews and customer reviews when present separately reduce the search time considerably,both not when present together,suggesting a trade-off.However we find that when both types of reviews are present together,the cognitive cost of processing non-review information is significantly reduced,implying more efficient allocation of cognitive resources.We also find that the presence of both types of reviews increases decision confidence considerably.We conclude with several managerial recommendations for ecommerce firms.