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 to disclosure design with improved salience. We find that posting hygiene scores on restaurants’ Yelp pages leads to a 12% decrease in purchase intentions for restaurants with low scores (as predefined by the City) relative to those with higher scores. We then create a “hygiene alert”—a message that appears only for low-score restaurants identified by the City as having “poor” operating conditions with “high-risk” hygiene violations (using the same low score threshold as above)—and find a further 7% decrease in purchase intentions. Moreover, the presence of an alert reduces the restaurant’s likelihood of getting a second alert. We conclude that disclosure policy should focus not only on what information to disclose, but also on how and where to design disclosure.
Keywords: Information; Web; Quality; Safety; Food; Consumer Behavior; Outcome or Result; Food and Beverage Industry;
Citation:
Dai, Weijia (Daisy), and Michael Luca. "Digitizing Disclosure: The Case of Restaurant Hygiene Scores." Harvard Business School Working Paper, No. 18-088, February 2018. (Revised August 2018.) View Details
