To Claim or Not To Claim? Hidden Costs of Business Page Claiming

Local businesses with limited budgets are increasingly turning to online review platforms to monitor customer reviews posted on their business pages, many of which are created by customers. Despite the clear benefits and the low cost of claiming ownership of such business pages, a significant number of pages remain unclaimed, which begs the following question. What is the downside of business page claiming? This study examines the impact of an owner’s business page claiming on customer reviews using a unique data set from Yelp. By leveraging the heterogeneous timing of owner business page claiming, we estimate that the action of business page claiming—which changes a business page status on Yelp from “unclaimed” to “claimed”—lowers average customer rating by 10.3%, which is accompanied by an increase in negative sentiment and a decrease in positive sentiment in review text. This is mainly driven by an increased chance of receiving the lowest customer ratings and a decreased chance of receiving the highest customer ratings. Moreover, after a business page is claimed, customers who provide the lowest ratings tend to write lengthier reviews and address business owners more directly about service issues in their reviews. Although business page claiming may signal trustworthiness and responsibility, this study offers a cautionary note to small businesses; claiming your business page on a review platform is not costless, even if it is free of charge. We urge business owners to have realistic expectations about and make adequate preparations for business page claiming.

History: Bin Gu, Senior Editor; Jingjun (David) Xu, Associate Editor.

Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/isre.2024.1305.