Dynamic status signaling: How foodies signal cosmopolitanism on Yelp

Abstract

Influenced by older work on high culture, researchers often look to the social closure that institutions can provide to explain how elites avoid having their status signaling overrun by imitators. In so doing our understanding of status signaling has been biased toward long-lasting social processes and relatively stable social situations, at the expense of more dynamic circumstances and behavior. This paper uses restaurant review data from Yelp to give evidence of dynamic status signals, constructed around rarity in real-time thanks to consumers’ perception of the market. Supported by this mechanism, these status signals that are fast to develop and fast to change indicate the need to enlarge our theories to accommodate more complex systems.