Here's How Yelp Scores Affect A Restaurant's Bottom Line
Eric Barker
- How can you fool people into thinking you like that awful Christmas gift they gave you?
- Are arranged marriages happier?
- Should we buy good gifts for men and lousy gifts for women?
See Also:
It Turns Out Money Can Buy Happiness
Here’s The Trick To Avoid Making Those Impulsive Decisions
A Baking Entrepreneur Reveals Why Packaging Is Such A Huge Rip-Off
A one star increase in the Yelp rating provides a 5-9% increase in revenue, unless it’s a chain restaurant:
Do online consumer reviews affect restaurant demand? I investigate this question using a novel dataset combining reviews from the website Yelp.com and restaurant data from the Washington State Department of Revenue. Because Yelp prominently displays a restaurant’s rounded average rating, I can identify the causal impact of Yelp ratings on demand with a regression discontinuity framework that exploits Yelp‟s rounding thresholds. I present three findings about the impact of consumer reviews on the restaurant industry: (1) a one-star increase in Yelp rating leads to a 5-9 percent increase in revenue, (2) this effect is driven by independent restaurants; ratings do not affect restaurants with chain affiliation, and (3) chain restaurants have declined in market share as Yelp penetration has increased. This suggests that online consumer reviews substitute for more traditional forms of reputation. I then test whether consumers use these reviews in a way that is consistent with standard learning models. I present two additional findings: (4) consumers do not use all available information and are more responsive to quality changes that are more visible and (5) consumers respond more strongly when a rating contains more information. Consumer response to a restaurant‟s average rating is affected by the number of reviews and whether the reviewers are certified as “elite” by Yelp, but is unaffected by the size of the reviewers Yelp friends network.
Source: “Reviews, Reputation, and Revenue: The Case of Yelp.Com” from Harvard Business School Working Paper Series
Follow me on Twitter, Facebook, or RSS.
Related posts:
Do waitresses with big boobs get bigger tips?
What makes us tip more at restaurants?
Read more posts on Barking Up The Wrong Tree »
