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MARCH | APRIL 2015 BizEd 13 PHOTOGRAPH BY ISTOCK Yelp as Prophet? THREE RESEARCHERS at the University of Maryland's Smith School of Busi- ness in College Park are developing a tool to predict whether a restaurant is about to shut its doors for good. Doctoral student Jorge Mejia, assistant professor Shawn Mankad, and associate professor Anandasivam Gopal have analyzed 130,000 postings on the popular user review site Yelp to discover whether a computer-assisted text analysis of these reviews could predict a restaurant's closure more accurately than user ratings alone. The researchers focused on reviews for 2,600 restaurants that had recently operated in the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area. They identified 454 that had closed between 2005 and 2014, as well as lin- guistic patterns in the reviews that indicated the type of restaurant and the quality of the user's experience. They then matched restaurants of similar type to better compare reviews. For instance, restaurants whose reviews included words like "good," "friend," "great," "nice" and "neighborhood" had a high rate of survival. The researchers also identified words and phrases under five catego- ries: overall quality, speed, responsiveness, food quality, and atmo- sphere. Reviews loaded with "high-weighted" words and phrases—such as "wonderful ambience" and "attentive wait staff "—also provided an accurate prediction of high restaurant quality. The study went further to find that high-dollar restaurants were more likely to close than less expensive ones, and that speed of service played a larger role in restaurant closures than atmosphere or food quality. "Using our approach, a restaurant could monitor its performance in the dimensions that matter the most to customers," the researchers write. Says Mankad, "We are surrounded by all of this free, unstructured data. We should be using that data." "More Than Just Words: Using Latent Semantic Analysis in Online Reviews to Explain Restaurant Closures" is a working paper based on Mejia's dissertation. Disgust and Self Interest In a study involving 600 participants, re- searchers found that individuals were more likely to engage in self-interested behaviors such as lying and cheating after writing essays or viewing film scenes that provoked feelings of disgust than those who had not. The experiment, which involved equal numbers of men and women, was part of a study co-authored by Karen Page Win- terich of Penn State's Smeal College of Business in University Park; Vikas Mittal of Rice University's Jones Graduate School of Business in Houston, Texas; and Andrea Morales of Arizona State University's W.P. Carey School of Business in Tempe. In another set of experiments, research- ers asked participants to evaluate cleansing products such as disinfectants and body wash after experiencing a sense of disgust. They found that this group was no more likely to engage in deception than those in a control group who had expe- rienced neutral emotions. People often don't realize they feel disgust, which can be caused by something as simple as a newspaper arti- cle. The emotion triggers a sense of self-protection, the authors explain—which can lead to self-interested behav- iors such as lying, stealing, and cheating. If companies create clean environments—or even make someone think of cleaning—they could mitigate the effects of disgust and encourage greater cooper- ation. The question for companies, says Mittal, is "how do you create an environment that is less emotionally cluttered so you can become progressively more thoughtful?" "Protect Thyself: How Affective Self-pro- tection Increases Self-interested, Unethical Behavior" was published in the November 2014 issue of Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes. Disgust trig- gers a sense of self-protection— which can lead to self-interest- ed behaviors such as lying, stealing, and cheating.