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- May–June 2023
- Article
Which Firms Gain from Digital Advertising? Evidence from a Field Experiment
By: Weijia Dai, Hyunjin Kim and Michael Luca
Measuring the returns of advertising opportunities continues to be a challenge for many
businesses. We design and run a field experiment in collaboration with Yelp across 18,294
firms in the restaurant industry to understand which types of businesses gain more from...
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- 2022
- Working Paper
Consumer Reviews and Regulation: Evidence from NYC Restaurants
By: Chiara Farronato and Georgios Zervas
We investigate the informativeness of hygiene signals in online reviews, and their effect on consumer choice and restaurant hygiene. We first extract signals of hygiene from Yelp. Among all dimensions that regulators monitor through mandated restaurant inspections, we...
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- October 2020 (Revised August 2022)
- Case
Experimentation at Yelp
By: Iavor I Bojinov and Karim R. Lakhani
- May 2020
- Article
Digitizing Disclosure: The Case of Restaurant Hygiene Scores
By: Weijia (Daisy) Dai and Michael Luca
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...
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- October 14, 2019
- Article
Designing Better Online Review Systems
By: Geoff Donaker, Hyunjin Kim and Michael Luca
Online reviews are transforming the way consumers choose products and services of all sorts. We turn to TripAdvisor to plan a vacation, Zocdoc to find a doctor, and Yelp to choose a new restaurant. Reviews can create value for buyers and sellers alike, but only if they...
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- Article
Product Quality and Entering Through Tying: Experimental Evidence
By: Hyunjin Kim and Michael Luca
Dominant platform businesses often develop products in adjacent markets to complement their core business. One common approach used to gain traction in these adjacent markets has been to pursue a tying strategy. For example, Microsoft pre-installed Internet Explorer...
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Keywords:
Tying;
Platform Strategy;
Google;
Product;
Quality;
Digital Platforms;
Strategy;
Market Entry and Exit
- 2018
- Working Paper
Product Quality and Entering Through Tying: Experimental Evidence
By: Michael Luca
Dominant platform businesses often develop products in adjacent markets to complement their core business. One common approach used to gain traction in these adjacent markets has been to pursue a tying strategy. For example, Microsoft pre-installed Internet Explorer...
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- September 2018
- Article
Aggregation of Consumer Ratings: An Application to Yelp.com
By: Weijia Dai, Ginger Jin, Jungmin Lee and Michael Luca
Because consumer reviews leverage the wisdom of the crowd, the way in which they are aggregated is a central decision faced by platforms. We explore this "rating aggregation problem" and offer a structural approach to solving it, allowing for (1) reviewers to vary in...
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- 2018
- Working Paper
Measuring Gentrification: Using Yelp Data to Quantify Neighborhood Change
By: Edward L. Glaeser, Hyunjin Kim and Michael Luca
We demonstrate that data from digital platforms such as Yelp have the potential to improve our understanding of gentrification, both by providing data in close to real time (i.e., nowcasting and forecasting) and by providing additional context about how the local...
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- May 2018
- Article
Nowcasting Gentrification: Using Yelp Data to Quantify Neighborhood Change
By: Edward L. Glaeser, Hyunjin Kim and Michael Luca
Data from digital platforms have the potential to improve our understanding of gentrification and enable new measures of how neighborhoods change in close to real time. Combining data on businesses from Yelp with data on gentrification from the Census, Federal Housing...
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- March 2018 (Revised February 2023)
- Teaching Note
Managing Diversity and Inclusion at Yelp
By: Michael Luca, Joshua Schwartzstein and Gauri Subramani
Teaching Note for HBS No. 918-009.
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- 2017
- Working Paper
Nowcasting the Local Economy: Using Yelp Data to Measure Economic Activity
By: Edward L. Glaeser, Hyunjin Kim and Michael Luca
Can new data sources from online platforms help to measure local economic activity? Government datasets from agencies such as the U.S. Census Bureau provide the standard measures of economic activity at the local level. However, these statistics typically appear only...
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- September 2017 (Revised February 2023)
- Supplement
Managing Diversity and Inclusion at Yelp (B)
By: Michael Luca, Joshua Schwartzstein and Gauri Subramani
Supplements the (A) case.
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- August 2017 (Revised February 2023)
- Case
Managing Diversity and Inclusion at Yelp
By: Michael Luca, Joshua Schwartzstein and Gauri Subramani
This case explores the industry-wide lack of employee diversity in the technology sector and Yelp’s decision to take a leadership position in identifying strategies to increase diversity. The goal of the case is to provide an opportunity for students to develop a...
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- December 2016
- Article
Fake It Till You Make It: Reputation, Competition, and Yelp Review Fraud
By: Michael Luca and Georgios Zervas
Consumer reviews are now part of everyday decision making. Yet, the credibility of these reviews is fundamentally undermined when businesses commit review fraud, creating fake reviews for themselves or their competitors. We investigate the economic incentives to commit...
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- July 2016
- Teaching Note
Launching Yelp Reservations
By: Michael Luca, Kevin Mohan and Patrick Rooney
This teaching note accompanies "Launching Yelp Reservations (A) and (B)," which present a multi-party negotiation among Yelp, current partner OpenTable, and two startups in the online restaurant reservation industry.
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- March 2016
- Supplement
Advertising Experiments at RestaurantGrades
By: Weijia Dai, Hyunjin Kim and Michael Luca
This exercise provides students with a data set consisting of results from a hypothetical experiment, and asks students to make recommendations based on the data. Through this process, the exercise teaches students to analyze, design, and interpret experiments. The...
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- 2016
- Chapter
User-Generated Content and Social Media
By: Michael Luca
This paper documents what economists have learned about user-generated content (UGC) and social media. A growing body of evidence suggests that UGC on platforms ranging from Yelp to Facebook has a large causal impact on economic and social outcomes ranging from...
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- August 2015
- Supplement
Launching Yelp Reservations (B)
By: Michael Luca, Kevin Mohan and Patrick Rooney