Examining the effect of competition
Nigel AR Henry
November 22, 2015
This presentation looks at businesses in the Yelp database open or closed for business as a measure of the rate of business failure, and seeks to find a relationship between ratings and business failure.

There is a steep decline in business closing with increasing rating
The pink dots shows businesses that have closed. There are more closures in the lower star businesses (bottom of the graph). However, within any rating level (horizontal lines) businesses in high-star cities (on the right) have more pink dots than those in low-star cities (on the left).
(Intercept) stars citystars
1.26203642 0.03982539 -0.13688630
2.5 % 97.5 %
(Intercept) 1.15775658 1.36631626
stars 0.03629485 0.04335593
citystars -0.16532838 -0.10844422
If combined into a linear model, this effect (rating compared to neighbors) is stronger than the effect of the star rating itself, and is statistically significant.