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“
The difficulty of distinguishing good quality from bad is inherent in the business world,” wrote the economist George Akerlof. His famous “lemon problem” took the used-car market as the quintessential case of information asymmetry: The seller knew much more about the quality of the car than the buyer. This could lead to the buyer's being cheated. Because of that very danger, however, the price the seller
was able to offer could be depressed. Brands, for Akerlof, were one way for consumers to “retaliate” in the face of a poor product, by not giving it their business, across the board, in the future. And chains, brands writ upon the landscape, could offer that same assurance. The customer knew what to expect. However modest that expectation was, it was
better than having an expectation violated
.

Eating at the chain restaurant on the highway posed its own information problem. “
The customers are seldom local,” Akerlof wrote. “The reason is that these well-known chains offer a better hamburger than the
average
local restaurant; at the same time, the local customer, who knows his area, can usually choose a place he prefers.”

Let us call this the “lemon chicken problem.” That local consumer, having more information than you, was always going to eat better. In an information-poor environment, you could settle for a series of blandly average experiences but never find that one transcendent place to which, as travel magazines like to say, “locals flock.” Of course, by the time tourists began to flock, that business probably began caring less about what locals thought, and maybe the quality slipped—because how many would be back anyway? In a pinch, you could simply go with your gut. Sometimes you left clutching it.

The arrival of Web sites like Yelp and TripAdvisor and Amazon fundamentally altered things. That mold on the shower curtain in room 224? Tell the world about it! That hidden place on Route 51 that made the amazing doughnuts? A touch of GPS, an aggregate of “user-generated content,” and you were suddenly privy to an experience you might have previously missed.

That “electronic word of mouth” can move markets is beyond question. On Amazon.​com, a National Bureau of Economic Research study has found, an increase in the “average star” of a book gives that book a “
higher relative share” of all books on the site. A group of researchers in Ireland, meanwhile, found a “TripAdvisor effect”: After the service was introduced in Ireland, hotels' TripAdvisor aggregate ratings rose over a two-year period.
Hotels were either responding to online feedback or indeed trying to earn higher ratings. Either way, guests got better rooms. Hotels in Las Vegas, meanwhile, where TripAdvisor was already known, saw no change. Like some version of the “efficient market” hypothesis, all information had already been “priced” into the Vegas hotels' reviews.

On Yelp, Michael Luca, an economist at Harvard University, found in the Seattle market that a one-star increase in a restaurant's rating lifted its revenue as much as 9 percent. The effect was “being driven entirely from independent restaurants.” This makes sense: Because chains, in essence, fill in the gaps in word of mouth, they do not depend on it for their business. What could you say about a chain that someone would not already know? Does the world care if you do not happen to like the secret sauce on a McDonald's Big Mac? No—because billions of others apparently do.

Luca also found that chains, after Yelp was introduced in the market he was studying, began to lose market share to independent restaurants. Picture Akerlof's prototypical customer in 1963, eating his slightly better-than-average hamburger at a roadside chain, magically granted a smartphone: Suddenly he could learn where to get a
great
hamburger. As Luca notes, the “utility” of going to an independent restaurant was higher. Eaters had nothing to lose but the chains. It was that “efficient market” again:
When all “known information” has already been built into stock prices (or restaurant ratings), amateur investors (or amateur diners) can do as well as experts. One might even argue that Yelp, and the broader transmission of online taste, have helped drive the emergence of better chain restaurant options.

But electronic word of mouth introduces its own problems. Instead of a paucity of information, you may these days encounter the reverse problem: too much information. You wade into a Yelp entry for a simple diagnosis of whether a place is worth your money. You find zigzagging polarities of experience: A meal was “to die for”; the same meal was “pretty lame.” Or you find yourself pulled into the narrow channels of people's proclivities—a dislike of the music, a digression into the flatware design. Having sifted through a morass of reviews, you may begin to feel a kind of hangover. Either you quit the place altogether, or by the time you arrive, you already feel weighted by a certain exhaustion of expectation, as if you had already consumed the experience and were now simply going through the motions.

Reading through the reviews of a restaurant, you may find yourself reviewing the reviewers. For as important as the question of whether they liked it is,
Are they like us?
One looks for signals of authority and a shared outlook. A red flag for me, for example, is the word “awesome.” It is not simply that I think the word has lost most of its connotation.
It is that I place less trust in the opinion of someone who uses it (for example, “awesome margaritas”
*
³
—and you may trust me less for not trusting it. The word “anniversary” or “honeymoon” in a review portends people with inflated expectations for their special night. Their complaint with any perceived failure by the restaurant or hotel to rise to this solemn occasion is not necessarily ours. I reflexively downgrade reviewers writing with syrupy dross picked up from hotel brochures (“It was a vision of perfection”) or employing such trite abominations as “sin-fully delicious!”

This idea that we are interested as much in what a person's review says about him as it does about the restaurant or hotel is, in one respect, not new. Our previous choices were informed either by friends we trusted or by critics whose voices seemed to carry authority. But suddenly the door has been opened to a multitude of voices, each bearing no preexisting authority or social trust. Critics have always been suspected of having their own preferences and biases, but on the Internet a thousand critics have bloomed. The messy, complicated, often hidden dynamics of taste and preference, and the battles over them, are suddenly laid out in front of us.

The rise of this crowd-sourced aggregate of amateur reviewers is generally seen as an egalitarian blossoming, freeing consumers from the tyranny of individual, elite mandarins, each harboring his own agenda and tastes. “
The excising of the expert review is happening right across the board,” declared the writer Suzanne Moore in
The Guardian
. “Who needs expertise when every Tom, Dick and Harriet reviews everything for free anyway. Isn't this truly democratic? The nature of criticism is changing, so this hierarchy of expertise is crumbling.”

One can almost hear the anticipatory echoes of something like Yelp in the context of the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset's 1930 tract
The Revolt of the Masses
. The multitude, he wrote, once “
scattered about the world in small groups,” appears “as an agglomeration,” it has “suddenly become visible,” and where it once occupied the “background
of the social stage,” it “now has advanced to the footlights and is the principal character.” The disgruntled and disenfranchised diner is now able to make or break a restaurant through sheer collective will. Against this leveling of critical power, the old guard fulminates. Ruth Reichl, the former editor of
Gourmet
, raised the clarion: “
Anybody who believes Yelp is an idiot. Most people on Yelp have no idea what they're talking about.”

There are complications with this idea that the Internet has done away with the need for experts and for critical authority. For one, much reviewing energy on Yelp is precisely an effort to establish one's bona fides. A reviewer for an Indian restaurant in midtown Manhattan lays down a triple claim of authority: “I am a foodie and my love for Indian food (as an Indian) is tough to match. I eat at this restaurant at least once a week. Really innovative mix of ingredients, and yet extremely authentic.” Not only is he a foodie; he is an Indian foodie who, like all true food critics, has eaten here more than once. And we will not unpack that thorny word “authentic.”
Slippery though it may be, the word “authentic,” or synonyms thereof, seems to lead to higher ratings for Yelp restaurants.

Yelp is filled with this sort of signaling, as economists call it, subtle references conferring one's authority in an effort to rise above the masses of similar reviewers. (“I knew the chef from his previous stint at…” or, “Of all the Henan cuisine places I've eaten, this is one of the best.”) It is “conventional signaling”: There is nothing in the signal itself to verify what you are saying beyond the fact that you are saying it. If you wear a T-shirt saying, “I ♥ NYC,” who are we to doubt your ardor? There is little “cost,” in money or energy, involved in the signal; hence, there is little reliability. What is there, actually, to keep these signals from losing
all
reliability? As Judith Donath argues, their honesty may in essence come simply “
because there is little motivation to produce them dishonestly.” There is also little motivation to doubt their veracity. So online, where anonymity rules and, as Donath argues, “everything is a signal,” how can you quickly assess the quality of a review?

Even as it aggregates its democratic horde, Yelp itself strives to reintroduce hierarchy, through its class of “elite” reviewers. They wear badges—a kind of signal—and are picked by a team known as the Council. “We don't share how it's done,” a Yelp spokesperson declared, as if
describing the covert hiring of Michelin inspectors. This is a bit of a paradox. We are said to live in a world where traditional expert authority—from the media to the government to the health-care establishment—is now suspect.
But have the online review sites (with Amazon's “Top Reviewer” and TripAdvisor's “Top Contributor” designations) simply reconstituted a new form of expertise, the curious phenomenon of “lay expertise”?

How much trust do we put in this new class of experts? When you glance at a restaurant or hotel or book review online, do you simply look at the aggregate number of stars, or do you skim down into the thicket of individual opinions? If the power of online word of mouth comes from the ability to quantify a collective mass of opinion—liberating us from the narrowness of one person's perspective—what is the value of reading any one review?

In his Yelp study, Luca reported examples of “Bayesian learning.” In other words, people reacted more strongly to reviews that seemed to have more information. Elite Yelp reviewers, he found, had twice the statistical impact as nonelites. Another group that had an outsized effect on Yelp were users of Groupon, the online coupon site. Groupon users, once on Yelp, write longer reviews that are better liked than those of the average Yelp user, as research has shown. This influence has real weight: They also seem to bring down the average review for a restaurant. Curiously, it is not that they are critical per se.
In fact, Groupon users on Yelp, the authors pointed out, are more “moderate.”

The idea of the masses liberating the objects of criticism from the tyranny of critics is clouded by the number of reviewers who seem to turn toward petty despotism. Reading Yelp or TripAdvisor reviews, particularly of the one-star variety, one quickly senses the particular axe being ground: the hostess who shot the “wrong” look to the “girls' night” group; the waiter who did not respond with enthusiasm to the cuteness of the diner's toddler; the “judgmental attitude” of a server; a greeting that is too effusive or insufficiently so; the waiter deemed “too uneasy with being a waiter”; or any number of episodes (these are all actual examples I have gleaned from the site) that have little to do with food. They are labor disputes: between patrons' capital and the endlessly subjective expectation of what they should receive.

As so much of the service economy now revolves around “affective labor”—the enforced smiles that organizations induce their employees
to give “guests”—evaluations of the “product” turn increasingly subjective and interpersonal. The writer Paul Myerscough has observed, “
Work increasingly isn't, or isn't only, a matter of producing things, but of supplying your energies, physical and emotional, in the service of others.” For those who feel they did not receive the right kind of emotional energy, Yelp becomes a place to catalog these litanies of complaint. How are we to know the reviewer was not simply having a bad day?

At the extreme end of the trust problem with online reviews are those that are actually fake: planted by the rival restaurateur, the jealous author, the jilted hotel guest.
Nearly one-fourth of Yelp reviews are rejected by the site's own authenticity filters. The frequency of these false ratings, as Luca and Georgios Zervas have found, tends to follow fairly predictable patterns. The more negative a restaurant's reputation, or the fewer the reviews, the greater the chance for a false positive review. When restaurants are of a similar type (for example, “Thai” or “Vegan”) and geographically
closer
, the odds goes up for a false negative review. Similar patterns are observed on TripAdvisor.

Sometimes the reasons for deception are rather unclear: A study by Eric Anderson and Duncan Simester of one online apparel site found that in 5 percent of all reviews customers had not actually purchased the item (but had purchased many other things at the site). These reviews tended to be more negative, and the authors hypothesized the customers were acting as de facto “brand managers”—a form of that customer “retaliation” that Akerlof described.