To address the question, bad reviews can affect popularity based on how things are listed and sorted online. If a restaurant has bad reviews then it will be lower on the list when sorted by average review. This will affect their popularity by not being as visible, and possibly the poor reviews affecting people’s desire to eat there.

I personally don’t go online and immediately sort by restaurants with 1 or 2 stars. I tend to sort by those with higher ratings.

Fake bad reviews by competitors and mean spirited people do know their actions have an affect on that business.

> To address the question, bad reviews can affect popularity...

That's not the question that others are referring to. Everyone agrees that bad reviews affect the popularity.

The question others want answered is how one distinguishes a "decent restaurant with bad reviews" from a "bad restaurant with bad reviews". Yes, initial bad reviews are likely to affect the number of total reviews a restaurant receives. But it's also clear that a bad restaurant is likely to get bad initial reviews. The press release says that the ratings of the initial reviews determines (causes) the total number of reviews and hence the eventual popularity of the restaurant, but doesn't explain how the researchers eliminated the apparently obvious alternative causal explanation that bad restaurants are more likely to get initial bad reviews, leading to fewer total reviews.

One hopes that the paper (which I haven't read yet) answers this better than the press release: https://sci-hub.tw/https://doi.org/10.1080/23754931.2020.179...

> The question others want answered is how one distinguishes a "decent restaurant with bad reviews" from a "bad restaurant with bad reviews". But it's also clear that a bad restaurant is likely to get bad initial reviews.

A helpful move for new establishments—especially independent ones which don't have the organizing strategies of large corporations—would be to delay allowing comments for 3–6 months. I've worked in food for a long time, still do, and it's so difficult to have all aspects of an establishment in a good place at the outset. Give restaurants the time to work out those kinks before accepting comments.

One other option would be to display something like “this restaurant did not receive enough ratings to show them” like some online stores do.

> One hopes that the paper (which I haven't read yet) answers this better than the press release

The paper: As the number of reviews is statistically significant and positive in all of the regression models, the more reviews a restaurant receives, the higher rating it has.

That wasn't the question.

The question was - how do they know it's the bad reviews that hurt the restaurants, or if it's actually the bad service (which caused the bad reviews) that hurts the restaurants.

They observe an effect - hurt restaurant - they see bad reviews - they blame the bad reviews. But was it actually the bad service (evident from the bad reviews) which hurt the restaurant?

Is it possible for there to be such a thing as bad service which is not bad reviews?

The actual physical activities the restaurant does, such as choosing a menu, cooking food, handing food to customer, playing low music, cannot be good or bad on some independent scale. What you may see as bad service, I may see as great service.

I think the only possible thing is “what does the market think.” So the entire problem is correlation.

“Bad service” is, literally by definition, the name we give after the fact to types of service that correlated with bad reviews and low revenue.

> The actual physical activities the restaurant does, such as choosing a menu, cooking food, handing food to customer, playing low music, cannot be good or bad on some independent scale.

at a minimum, the health department disagrees, re cooking and delivering food.

I don’t see how health / sanitation law is related to the discussion.

Health/sanitation law is intended to stop people from getting sick from restaurant food. If you get sick from restaurant food, that would universally be considered a bad experience (and for those inclined, a bad review). That's a direct counterexample to the GP claim that there's no agreed-upon way to distinguish "bad" and "good" experiences.

I still fail to see why anyone thinks this is relevant. I agree health law exists for the purpose you cite - and this fact is not related to why patrons in the study give bad reviews of restaurants that are actively operating with permission of the health department.

> The actual physical activities the restaurant does, such as choosing a menu, cooking food, handing food to customer, playing low music, cannot be good or bad on some independent scale. What you may see as bad service, I may see as great service.

Once we went to a restaurant with hardly any diners, not at all busy. We ordered dinner. They served half our order. We waited for the other half. After about half an hour, we asked the manager. He went to investigate, and came back with the admission that they had forgotten to submit the other half of our order to the kitchen.

That's objectively bad service. I don't see how anyone could see that as "great service".

Now, maybe it was just an innocent mistake, someone having a bad day, and maybe the manager is really apologetic and offers some compensation and I forgive them. It would rule them out of consideration for a five star review, but I wouldn't give them one star just for that. Unless, if I had gone on a review site and saw a dozen other people complaining about the same restaurant messing up their order, then I probably would have left a one star review too.

My psychologist had a bad review saying that he made her talk about her problems and said that it sounded like it was her fault. She got all defensive and put him on blast. I don’t remember the specifics but reading her “bad” review made me think he’d be a good psychologist, tough but fair type. He was!