Decipher Yelp Elite Squad Badge

Voiceover

Presenter (s)

Shristee Sinha

Abstract or Description

Yelp is an American based public company which publishes crowd-sourced reviews about local businesses on Yelp.com website and Yelp mobile app. It encourages individuals to contribute through writing reviews about various local businesses in their towns. These reviewers are officially recognized by Yelp by awarding Yelp Elite Squad badges on the yearly basis. These Elite badge algorithms are not disclosed in the public domain, and as a result, we attempt to decipher them to understand the expert recognition mechanism on Yelp. Our findings can offer suggestions to Yelp users who are eager to grow their reputations in the review community as well as provide a profile picture of Yelp badge owners.

Using large-scale Pittsburgh restaurant data, we have observed that the reviewers are awarded Elite Squad badges more on the quantitative and qualitative reviews and less on their networks. Being a little counter-intuitive, a high number of friends or fans do not guarantee Yelp reviewers the Elite badge. Instead, the selection criteria put more weights on the useful review count and the user compliment attributes like Useful, Cool, Funny, Hot etc on their profiles. Through reverse engineering the Elite badge algorithms, we also observed that these badges were extensively awarded in the year 2016, 2017 and 2018. In addition, gender difference also exists as a greater number of Elite badges were distributed to female reviewers in these years. This finding supports prior theories that female reviewers are more expressive and tend to give back to the community more than males. They are also more tolerant and less critical, based on their higher average rating than males’. Another possible explanation for the much larger number of female Elite badge can be related to the “#MeToo” movement, through which Yelp is trying to give more public highlights to female reviewers.