In 2008, New York City mandated that all chain restaurants post calorie information on their menus. For managers of chain and standalone restaurants, as well as for policy makers, a pertinent goal might be to monitor the impact of this regulation on consumer conversations. We propose a scalable Bayesian topic model to measure and understand changes in consumer opinion about health (and other topics). We calibrate the model on 761,962 online reviews of restaurants posted over eight years. Our model allows managers to specify prior topics of interest such as “health” for a calorie posting regulation. It also allows the distribution of topic proportions within a review to be affected by its length, valence, and the experience level of its author. Using a difference-in-differences estimation approach, we isolate the potentially causal effect of the regulation on consumer opinion. Following the regulation, there was a statistically small but significant increase in the proportion of discussion of the health topic. This increase can be attributed largely to authors who did not post reviews before the regulation, suggesting that the regulation prompted several consumers to discuss health in online restaurant reviews. Data and the online appendix are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mksc.2017.1048 .
Do rewards from retailers such as free products and recognition in the form of status badges 1 influence the recipient's behavior? We present a novel application of natural language processing to detect differences in consumer behavior due to such rewards. Specifically, we investigate the "Enrollment" effect, i.e. whether receiving products for free affect how consumer reviews are written. Using data from Amazon's Vine program, we conduct a detailed analysis to detect stylistic differences in product reviews written by reviewers before and after enrollment in the Vine program. Our analysis suggests that the "Enrollment" effect exists. Further, we are able to characterize the effect on syntactic and semantic dimensions. This work has implications for researchers, firms and consumer advocates studying the influence of user-generated content as these changes in style could potentially influence consumer decisions.
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