The Effects of Online Review Platforms on Restaurant Revenue, Consumer Learning, and Welfare
利用德克萨斯州餐厅收入和评论数据，发现评论平台帮助消费者更快了解餐厅质量，使高质量独立餐厅收入增加5%-19%，低质量餐厅收入相应减少，并提高了消费者福利，尤其对游客影响更大。
This paper quantifies the effects of online review platforms on restaurant revenue and consumer welfare. Using a novel data set containing revenues and information from major online review platforms in Texas, I show that online review platforms help consumers learn about restaurant quality more quickly. The effects on learning show up in restaurant revenues. Specifically, doubling the review activity increases the revenue of a high-quality independent restaurant by 5%–19% and decreases that of a low-quality restaurant by a similar amount. These effects vary widely across restaurants’ locations. Restaurants around highway exits are affected twice as much as those in nonhighway areas, implying that reviews are more useful to travelers and tourists than locals. The effects also decline as restaurants age, consistent with the diminishing value of information in learning. In contrast, chain restaurants are affected to a much lesser degree than independent restaurants. Building on this evidence, I develop a structural demand model with aggregate social learning. Counterfactual analyses indicate that online review platforms raise consumer welfare much more for tourists than for locals. By encouraging consumers to eat out more often at high-quality independent restaurants, online review platforms increased the total industry revenue by 3.0% over the period from 2011–2015. This paper was accepted by Matthew Shum, marketing. Supplemental Material: Data and the online appendix are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2021.4279 .