BU Research Underscores Impact of Groupon on Reputation

John Byers, Georgios Zervas, and their collaborator at Harvard University, Michael Mitzenmacher published a paperon arXiv.org last week, which showed statistically significant influence on reputation on Yelp for merchants who use Groupon deals: Yelp ratings go down by 10% and reviews from deal seekers are 20% more negative than average, but number of reviews surges significantly. The paper got picked up by the MIT Technology Review blog today, which then caused a bit of a stir on Twitter, and got picked up in various news outlets.