Crowd-Driven Competitive Intelligence: Understanding the Relationship between Local Market Structure and Online Rating Distributions

Crowdsourced information, such as online ratings, are increasingly viewed as a critical source for understanding local market dynamics. A key aspect of utilizing online ratings to derive competitive market intelligence is to delineate the systematic relationship between local market structure and distributional properties of online ratings. As one of the earliest papers in this stream, combining demographic, population, and restaurant review...