Filling in the Blanks: What Restaurant Patrons Assume About Missing Sanitation Inspection Grades

Abstract

How do people respond when decision-relevant information is withheld by sellers? The authors address this general question by examining how prospective diners respond when sanitation inspection grades (SIGs) are not reported by a restaurant. Despite disclosure mandates in some municipalities, SIGs are not always available when dining choices are made, especially when food is ordered for delivery. After documenting participants’ failure to discount appropriately for a missing SIG, the authors demonstrate, through a series of follow-up studies, the robustness of the phenomenon in the face of interventions designed to increase the salience of the missing information. The authors find evidence of increased discounting, however, in a study designed to draw attention to the missing information via a side-by-side comparison of restaurants that did and did not provide SIGs.

Attribute Sentiment Scoring with Online Text Reviews: Accounting for Language Structure and Missing Attributes

“…Thus, words need to be converted into a numerical vector before being fed into a neural network. 6 These vectors are called “embedding,” and most well-known embedding algorithms (e.g., word2vec, GloVe) are based on the distributional hypothesis—that is, words with similar meanings tend to co-occur more frequently (Harris 1954) and thus have vectors that are close in the embedding space. The efficiency of the neural network improves manifold if these initial inputs carry meaningful information about the relationships between words.…”

“…For example, Slovic and MacPhillamy (1974) and Peloza, Ye, and Montford (2015) discuss some common types of wrong inferences-higher weights on common attributes (i.e., attributes for which information is available for all options) or simply proxy a missing attribute score with some unrelated attribute score (extra-attribute misestimation). Gurney and Loewenstein (2019) provide an excellent review of this topic. Although the nature of these inferences may vary, the general takeaway is that missingness usually worsens choice and decision making.…”

The Impact of the Public Disclosure of Curved Inspection Scores Using Emojis on Hygiene Violations in Food Establishments

“…Therefore, it is important to study the impact of recent improvements in these presentationssuch as emoji-based displays with locality-adjusted hygiene scores. In the Finnish context, Gurney and Loewenstein (2020) found that the use of emojis to rate food establishments does influence the behaviors of customers. Here, we look at the effect on hygiene compliance by a food establishment.…”

“…Although the microbial contents of cream cakes were closely related 935398C QXXXX10.1177/1938965520935398Cornell Hospitality QuarterlyPatel and Rietveld research-article2020 1 Villanova University, PA, USA 2 Erasmus University Rotterdam, The Netherlands to the food inspectors' ranking, the microbial contents of pasta salads frequently exceeded standards in outlets with highly satisfactory rankings. In Finland, a system including both numerical information and four smiley faces was found to affect the purchase intentions of restaurant customers (Gurney & Loewenstein, 2020). Beyond Denmark and Finland, there is limited evidence on whether emojis are a useful disclosure mode.…”

New Directions in Behavioral Game Theory: Introduction to the Special Issue

“…Understanding pre-play cheap talk among rational players gives us a benchmark for studying pre-play cheap talk in laboratory games and in the real world; a context in which players are boundedly rational, may have incomplete information, and may have uncertainty or biases about each other's social preferences [23]. These behavioral elements allow communication to be informative in new and interesting ways [24][25][26][27][28][29].…”