The Costs of Ambiguous Information Disclosure: On the Unintended Consequences of Providing Restaurant Hygiene Scores on Platforms in the United States

Information disclosure on digital platforms is ubiquitous, yet it frequently results in unintended consequences, given the prevalence of simplified cues prone to ambiguity in digital platforms’ information design. We study how the addition of hygiene inspection scores, in the form of simplified information disclosure, to restaurant webpages on Yelp across the United States affects restaurant demand. We find that showing high (clean) hygiene scores on Yelp paradoxically reduces restaurant demand relative to restaurants for which Yelp does not show hygiene scores on their Yelp pages. We argue that consumers conflate online hygiene scores with the healthiness and tastiness of the food, thus intuitively leading to reduced demand. Our results reveal that ambiguity is the primary cause of misperceptions about hygiene scores. We also show that providing simple clarifications about the correct meaning of hygiene scores, as well as tweaking the displayed hygiene information to resolve ambiguity, helps mitigate consumer misperceptions. Our research informs practice on how valuable information can be presented online effectively in such a way as to reduce ambiguity, especially on social media platforms. We provide managerial implications for platforms such as Yelp and city municipal authorities that would like to disclose key information online.