Online review platforms strongly depend upon the quality and quantity of their content to be popular and successful. Because of this, in the past few years, such platforms have introduced a number of features to increase both the volume and quality of content produced. A particularly popular feature is review solicitation which allows firms to collect feedback from their customers by asking for it. Despite its popularity, the effects of review solicitation are currently not well understood. In this work, we use the setting of TripAdvisor to study how soliciting reviews affects ratings. In line with what many online platforms promise, we show that review solicitation increases the average rating and volume of reviews that a firm receives. To explain the mechanisms behind such findings we use a lab experiment, and show that these findings can be partially explained by reviewers self-selection.