Across a range of industries, regulators use ratings to inform consumers about firms and products. Using online experiments, we investigate two pathways through which individuals extract the information communicated by such ratings: beliefs about the distribution of ratings (e.g., how often good...

In late June 2013, the city of Louisville, Kentucky, announced plans to provide restaurant health inspection data to Yelp.com for publication on their popular online consumer-review forum. These data were already publicly available on the city's website. I utilize this partnership to test...