SourcesConsumer & householdE-commerce2026-10-06
Incumbent advantage: with identical specs, a well-known brand is recommended 100% of the time
Three experiments on skincare: identical specifications produce near-total dominance for known brands — and less than a +0.1-star edge for a competitor breaks it.
Setup: skincare, a category where consumers cannot judge quality before buying and must rely on reputation, tested across three commercial models (GPT-4o-mini, Claude Sonnet, Gemini 3 Flash), with a robustness check on search goods.