The Value of Competitor Information: Evidence from a Field Experiment

The author is grateful to Rebecca Henderson, Michael Luca, Amanda Pallais, and Dennis Yao for their support and encouragement throughout this project. This project would not have been possible without collaboration from Yelp (Darnell Holloway, Genna Gold, Ali Schwartz, Emily Washcovick, Matt Donzella, Sebastien Couvidat, and Wolfe Styke); administrative support from Jennifer Mucciarone and Angela Valvis; excellent research assistance from Alice Dai, Sarah Xu, Byron Perpetua, Dilhan Perera, Robert Courtney, Jiahao Huang, Fabian Konig, Claire Liu, Yao Xen Tan, Nicholas Young, and Ruijing Chen; and the tireless work of all of the data collectors. The author also thanks Juan Alcacer, Susan Athey, Nicholas Bloom, Yo-Jud Cheng, Ashley Craig, Christine Exley, Shane Greenstein, Rem Koning, Josh Krieger, Elizabeth Linos, Hong Luo, David Martin, Frank Nagle, and many seminar participants for valuable comments. The ability to publish is not tied to the results of this paper. This experiment was approved by the Harvard University and INSEAD Institutional Review Boards, and was preregistered on the AEA RCT Registry under trial number AEARCTR-0003013.