PhD Seminar Series: A New Tastemaker in Town: Competition Between Restaurant Guides in China

A New Tastemaker in Town: Competition Between Restaurant Guides in China

Speaker: Linqing Huang (Bocconi University)

Abstract: Expert rating organizations play a crucial role in contemporary markets by shaping consumer choices and organizational market hierarchy through their evaluations. Yet these evaluators themselves face competitive pressures that may compromise the objectivity and independence audiences expect from them. Drawing on optimal distinctiveness theory, we examine how expert rating organizations strategically agree and disagree with competitors to balance both credibility and distinctiveness. Using longitudinal data from China’s restaurant evaluation market (2017-2022), we analyze 4,662 evaluations across 454 restaurants by two competing guides: the Michelin Guide and the Black Pearl Guide. We find that expert rating organizations exhibit systematically different levels of agreement across two distinct evaluation dimensions – candidate coverage (which restaurants to review) versus candidate ratings (how highly to rate them) – with higher agreement in coverage decisions and lower agreement in rating decisions. Moreover, three organizational characteristics shape these agreement patterns: status (higher-status organizations agree less), market knowledge (greater local knowledge reduces agreement), and order of market entry (first-movers agree less). These findings reveal that optimal distinctiveness operates as a multidimensional, dynamic strategy rather than a uniform approach. Our study contributes to research on social evaluations by revealing how competitive positioning shapes evaluator behavior, and extends optimal distinctiveness theory by identifying how its application varies across strategic dimensions and over time.