local businesses

Positive Yelp scores translate into real revenue boosts for local restaurants but not for chains. That’s the basic finding of a recent study by Michael Luca, a researcher at Harvard Business School. He found that a one-star differential in ratings on the popular crowd-sourced review site can bump revenues by 5% to 9% at a local restaurant. This is not entirely surprising. What is more interesting is that chain restaurants did not benefit from any significant increase in profitability or revenue corresponding to Yelp ratings…