Heightened scrutiny: The unequal impact of online hygiene scores on restaurant reviews

Abstract

The success of the public display of restaurant hygiene scores has encouraged online review sites to display these scores digitally on their platforms. By investigating 225,252 Yelp reviews toward 1,937 restaurants in Charlotte, North Carolina, we find that while displaying hygiene scores digitally can inform consumers in a way that reduces bias in reviews, it paradoxically can also promote the creation of more reviews that are biased, something we call the cognitive–discursive dilemma. Specifically, after the digital display on Yelp, reviews mentioning hygiene were more in line with scores, indicating an improvement in “accuracy” across reviews in general. Yet, the digital display also led to greater attention to hygiene, leading to lower scores for restaurants of lower social status as measured by price and cuisine type. Our findings thus call for more attention to a broader theoretical implication about the provision of “accurate information” on review sites.