Popular Restaurants on Yelp
How do you decide where to eat, especially in an unfamiliar place with no friends to give you recommendations? Whether you’re in a big city or a small town, your first instinct is probably to look on Yelp.
Finding the “best” places to eat on Yelp is particularly easy for large cities — the top 10 restaurants with thousands of positive reviews show up immediately in the search results. But how did these restaurants gain such popularity? There are two network effects that can explain in large part how the top restaurants become popular and how they stay popular: information cascades and the “rich-get-richer” rule.
First, how does a restaurant become popular, especially when it’s relatively new? Information cascades are a phenomenon where a few people choosing to do something will cause everyone coming after them to follow their example under the assumption that the majority, or the “crowd,” knows more than any individual. In the case of Yelp, we can consider the case where a restaurant first gets a few reviews. If a place has three or four reviews, all of them positive, a Yelp user can already assume that this particular place is good and thus visit the restaurant. Shaped by these expectations, it is more likely that this user will find the experience pleasant and perhaps post another positive review, making this restaurant appear even more appealing to the next user who visits its page. Conversely, restaurants whose first few reviews are negative can experience an information cascade in the opposite direction, where most potential customers will choose not to visit the restaurant based off of the reviews — this results in a lack of people who could potentially stop or slow the cascade by leaving a positive review to counteract the original bad reviews.
The attached article gives an example of how these early positive reviews can have a huge impact upon the performance of a restaurant. Ike Shehadeh tried — and failed — to maintain a sandwich shop in San Francisco the first time, but managed to not only succeed, but also thrive his second time around. He attributes the difference to Yelp and the positive reviews people left online during his first few months.
Next, how do the most popular restaurants maintain their popularity? There exist parallels between what happens here and what the “rich-get-richer” rule describes. The “rich-get-richer” rule is actually used to describe the popularity of web pages, stating that it is more likely for an already-popular webpage to gain more links and, thus, become even more popular. If we consider restaurants that have many reviews and are popular, it makes sense that people browsing Yelp are more likely to visit these popular restaurants and are more likely to leave more positive reviews, making them even more popular.
http://www.sfgate.com/restaurants/article/Boon-or-bane-Yelp-s-impact-undeniable-5664925.php