|
Working Paper HBS Working Paper Series 2018 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. Implementing a difference-in-differences strategy, we find that posting restaurant hygiene scores on Yelp 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 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 9% 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;
Dai, Weijia (Daisy), and Michael Luca. "Digitizing Disclosure: The Case of Restaurant Hygiene Scores." Harvard Business School Working Paper, No. 18-088, February 2018.
