Digitizing Disclosure: The Case of Restaurant Hygiene Scores

Collaborating with Yelp and the city of San Francisco, we revisit a canonical example of quality disclosure by evaluating and helping to redesign the posting of restaurant hygiene scores on Yelp.com. We implement a two-stage intervention that separately identifies consumer response to information disclosure and a disclosure design with improved salience—a consumer alert. We find score posting is effective, but improving salience further increases consumer response. Moreover, the presence of an alert for a low-score restaurant reduces its probability of getting a low score again.