From an upset stomach to a life-threatening foodborne illness, getting sick is all too common after eating in restaurants. While health inspection programs are designed to protect consumers, such inspections typically occur at wide intervals of time, allowing restaurant hygiene to remain unmonitored in the interim periods. Information provided in online reviews may be effectively used in these ...

Controls for second hand smoke (SHS) and adolescent smoking have been still sociomedical concerns in Japan. Restaurant smoking restrictions are associated with community social norms affecting adolescent smoking behavior, and the status in areas around Junior high schools (JHSs) in the community could be a sign of community practices on regulating SHS for adolescents. To examine whether restaur...

Using canonical correlation analysis, this study examined the interdependencies in investing and financing decisions of restaurant firms. The results indicated that the similar four crossbalance sheet interdependencies exist in the restaurant industry as identified by previous studies for different industries and companies in various countries: (1) maturity matching structure of assets and liab...

Everyday, millions of users upload numerous photos of different businesses to Yelp. Though most of them are tagged with simple information such as business names, the deep-level information typically are not revealed until looked by humans. Such deep-level information contains things like whether the restaurant is good for lunch or dinner, whether it has outdoor seating, etc. This information c...

Improper food cooling practices are a significant cause of foodborne illness, yet little is known about restaurant food cooling practices. This study was conducted to examine food cooling practices in restaurants. Specifically, the study assesses the frequency with which restaurants meet U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) recommendations aimed at reducing pathogen proliferation during foo...

We develop two classes of optimization models to maximize revenue in a restaurant (while controlling average waiting time as well as perceived fairness) that may violate the first-come-first-serve (FCFS) rule. In the first class of models, we use integer programming, stochastic programming, and approximate dynamic programming methods to decide dynamically when, if at all, to seat an incoming pa...

This study was designed to determine the compliance of restaurants to the wheelchair accessibility standards set forth in the Uniform Federal Accessibility Standards. The standards that were operationalized in this study are also found in Title III of the Americans With Disabilities Act of 1990. The data were collected at 120 sites in three midwestern states. For one who uses a wheelchair, park...

Dealing with food allergies in the restaurant industry is becoming important as more customers have needs and restaurants are concerned with corporate social responsibilitiy (CSR). This research discusses how to provide information to facilitate the communication between the restaurant industry that is interested in dealing with food allergies and the patient’s family who wants to enjoy eating ...

We compare the effect of anonymous social network ratings (Yelp.com) and peer group recommendations on restaurant demand. We conduct a two stage choice experiment and combine it with online social network reviews from Yelp.com and find that peers have a stronger impact on restaurant demand than anonymous reviewers.

This Show & Tell demo paper describes a multi-strategy spoken dialogue system for restaurant recommendation and reservation in Singapore. The system uses a three phased dialogue strategy for recommendation, selection and booking. Given its simple architecture, it can be easily adapted to deploy restaurant recommendation services for any city, as far as the required regional data is available.