Consumer Perceptions of Green Restaurants: The Halo Effects of Green Practices

Abstract

Although green practices are considered distinguished green restaurants from others, customers’ awareness that restaurants have implemented such practices tends to influence their evaluations of those restaurants’ performance in aspects unrelated to green practices. The purpose of the study is to identify the halo effects of green practices on overall customer satisfaction in green restaurants. Specifically, we collected online review from Yelp.com in April 2016 using Python. We collected 82 online reviews, 828 from 218 green-certified restaurants. The results showed that customers who recognized the restaurant’s use of local/organic ingredients shared significantly more about the restaurants’ good service. Moreover, significant moderating effects were only found in service failure situations but not in successful service delivery situations. To our knowledge, this is the first empirical study to investigate halo effects in the context of consumer satisfaction.