| Previous studies have shown that air pollution could affect people’s emotions,and then affect people’s evaluation and judgment.We collected more than 5 million consumer reviews from Dianping.com,and estimated the impact of air pollution on consumer reviews by using multiple fixed effects model.On average,when AQI increases one standard deviation,the ratings will drop 0.002.This means that there is at least 20% increase in the probability of a decline in overall restaurant ratings.We estimated the impact of overall restaurant ratings on overall restaurant rankings.On average,one point drop in the restaurant’s overall rating will reduce the restaurant’s ranking among all restaurants in Beijing by 16,870.Therefore,by increasing one standard deviation in AQI,the restaurant’s ranking will drop 34.According to the regression results of the linear probability model,when AQI increases one standard deviation,the probability of the highest score one rates will drop 0.12%.This will make 1,809 consumers’ ratings change from the highest scores to the lower scores.We also find that air pollution has a nonlinear effect on consumer reviews.The light air pollution has no significant effect on consumer reviews.Our regression results show that the negative impact of air pollution on consumers is mainly from the more serious air pollution(AQI > 200).When AQI > 300,air pollution will lead to an additional 0.01 point drop in the rating.In addition to the immediate impact on consumers,air pollution also has the cumulative effect.With the increase of individual exposure time to air pollution,the negative impact of air pollution on consumer reviews will gradually increase,the cumulative effect of 25-day average AQI will reach the maximum,and then the negative impact will gradually decrease.When the 25-day average AQI increases one standard deviation,the consumer’s ratings will decrease 0.011.In addition,we also perform some robustness analysis,which further confirms the negative impact of air pollution on consumer reviews.At last,we perform the sentiment analysis to identify the consumer emotions behind the consumer comments,and empirically test the mechanism "Air PollutionEmotions-Evaluation and Judgement".As a result,we proved the channel behind the research question we studied.The sentiment analysis we used also provides enlightenment and reference for the future research related to emotions.As far as we know,we first accurately estimated the causal effect of air pollution and consumer reviews.We found that air pollution has a negative impact on consumer reviews.This shows that air pollution will not only reduce people’s life satisfaction,but also damage consumers’ dining satisfaction.Therefore,improving air quality can not only reduce the harm to physical and mental health,promote the labor productivity,reduce the damage on cognitive function,but also improve the dining satisfaction of consumers.Finally,our results show that it is necessary for restaurants to improve their business strategies when air pollution is severe.We suggest that restaurants can improve consumers’ emotions by improving restaurant service,offering discounts and other measures when air pollution is serious,to offset the systematic bias caused by air pollution. |
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