Weijia (Daisy) Dai and Michael Luca, “Digitizing Disclosure: The Case of Restaurant Hygiene Scores.” Harvard Business School, Working Paper 18-088, 2018 [pdf of 2019 version here].
• San Francisco does not mandate that restaurants post their hygiene scores – which are public information generated by unannounced inspections – but is willing to facilitate the posting of the scores on Yelp. (The scores already are available on the City's Department of Public Health website -- but people don't usually go there to order food online!) The (common) reluctance to require disclosure by the restaurants themselves might draw in part from restaurant industry opposition.
• Two interventions are examined: (1) Yelp posts the hygiene scores on its restaurant webpages; and (2) Yelp makes low scores salient via a “hygiene alert” box (which covers the customer reviews part of the Yelp listing)
• A “Poor” restaurant hygiene score (70 or below) results from multiple high-risk violations
• The hygiene alert box informs the webpage visitor that food safety is the point of the hygiene score, and that the score is based on government inspection; further, the alert reveals that the restaurant received a Poor rating in its most recent review, which puts it in the bottom 5% of hygiene ratings.
• Prior to the Yelp interventions, less hygienic restaurants see slightly lower consumer purchasing intentions than do their more hygienic counterparts. Those purchasing intentions are measured via Yelp page visits, “leads,” and the number of Yelp reviews. A "lead" is tallied through various behaviors by online shoppers, such as calling the restaurant, seeking directions to the restaurant, or checking out the restaurant's own webpage (as opposed to its Yelp listing).
• Leads and Yelp reviews respond in the expected direction to Yelp posting of the hygiene scores; Yelp (star) ratings do not
• “Poor” restaurants see a 12% decline in leads compared to the non-Poor
• The salience intervention enhances the posting effect: take-out orders for Poor restaurants fall 12.8%. That is, how information is disclosed seems to matter, along with the disclosure itself.
• Poor restaurants seem to be (somewhat) motivated to clean up their act after Yelp posts the alert
• San Francisco does not mandate that restaurants post their hygiene scores – which are public information generated by unannounced inspections – but is willing to facilitate the posting of the scores on Yelp. (The scores already are available on the City's Department of Public Health website -- but people don't usually go there to order food online!) The (common) reluctance to require disclosure by the restaurants themselves might draw in part from restaurant industry opposition.
• Two interventions are examined: (1) Yelp posts the hygiene scores on its restaurant webpages; and (2) Yelp makes low scores salient via a “hygiene alert” box (which covers the customer reviews part of the Yelp listing)
• A “Poor” restaurant hygiene score (70 or below) results from multiple high-risk violations
• The hygiene alert box informs the webpage visitor that food safety is the point of the hygiene score, and that the score is based on government inspection; further, the alert reveals that the restaurant received a Poor rating in its most recent review, which puts it in the bottom 5% of hygiene ratings.
• Prior to the Yelp interventions, less hygienic restaurants see slightly lower consumer purchasing intentions than do their more hygienic counterparts. Those purchasing intentions are measured via Yelp page visits, “leads,” and the number of Yelp reviews. A "lead" is tallied through various behaviors by online shoppers, such as calling the restaurant, seeking directions to the restaurant, or checking out the restaurant's own webpage (as opposed to its Yelp listing).
• Leads and Yelp reviews respond in the expected direction to Yelp posting of the hygiene scores; Yelp (star) ratings do not
• “Poor” restaurants see a 12% decline in leads compared to the non-Poor
• The salience intervention enhances the posting effect: take-out orders for Poor restaurants fall 12.8%. That is, how information is disclosed seems to matter, along with the disclosure itself.
• Poor restaurants seem to be (somewhat) motivated to clean up their act after Yelp posts the alert
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