Disappointment looms around the corner: Visibility and businesses’ local market power

We study whether restaurants in more visible urban locations receive different customer ratings, consistent with consumer-search models in which prominence interacts with search frictions. Using 1.5 million Yelp reviews of 61,000 restaurants in 18 cities across eight countries, we relate ratings to three location-based proxies for prominence: proximity to tourist landmarks, street corners, and public squares. Across specifications with rich controls and user-city fixed effects, restaurants in more prominent locations receive lower ratings. The results are robust to comparing nearby establishments and to checks addressing selection, crowding, and measurement, and we interpret them as consistent with a worse price–quality mix in prominent locations when continued search is costly.