Document Type

Article

Publication Date

9-1-2014

Publication Title

First Monday

Volume

19

Issue

9

Abstract

Reviews on Yelp.com can be an important factor in driving customers to a business. However, many business owners have expressed concern with Yelp’s review filtering system, which was created to flag low–quality or fake reviews. This study performs a content analysis of a subset of Yelp restaurant and religious organization reviews, visible and filtered, exploring signals from the reviews or the reviewers that might explain the filtering process. The study finds that factors intrinsic to the review itself are not related to filtering, but factors related to the reviewer are strong predictors. The Yelp system is much more likely to filter reviews from occasional, isolated reviewers than from prolific, socially connected reviewers.

Comments

Author Posting. © First Monday, 2014. This article is posted here by permission of First Monday for personal use, not for redistribution. The article was published in First Monday, Vol. 19, No. 9, 2014. http://dx.doi.org/10.5210/fm.v19i9.5436

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.

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