We recover the true underlying average rating for each restaurant and use this measure to implement a regression discontinuity (RD) design. We match the Yelp rating data to a database of restaurant reservation availability and estimate the impact of crossing each 0.5-star threshold on reservation availability. Our results indicate that Yelp ratings have substantial effects on restaurant customer flows. These impacts appear largest for restaurants for which there is less information on quality available
outside of Yelp.