Location, Location, Location! Quantifying the True Impact of Location on Business Reviews Using a Yelp Dataset

Today, with the emergence of various business review sites such as Yelp, Trip Advisor, and Zomato, people can write reviews and provide an assessment (often as 1–5 score rating). The success of a business on the crowd-sourced review platform has taken the form of positive reviews and high star ratings (failure are associated with negative reviews and low star ratings). We often claim that location plays a major role in determining the success or the failure of a given business. This paper attempts to verify this claim and quantifies the impact of location, solely, on business success, using two data sets; a Yelp dataset for business information and reviews, and another Location dataset that gathers location-based information in a city or an area. We perform an empirical study to quantify the impact of (i) relative location to well known landmarks and (ii) parameterized location (such as cost of living in a given zip code), on the success of restaurants. In our study, we found that parameterized location using location characteristic parameters such as housing affordability correlate highly with restaurant success with more than 0.81 correlation ratio. We also observe that the closer the restaurant to a landmark (relative location) the more likelihood it succeeds.