Todd Schifeling and colleagues explore how the proliferation of gourmet food trucks influences diner evaluations of brick-and-mortar restaurants that offer diverse, fusion-style menus. By integrating interviews with food truck entrepreneurs and extensive Yelp data from 2005 to 2014 across seven US cities, they link annual counts of food trucks to ratings for 34,727 restaurants. Using a panel random-effects Tobit model with controls for review volume, restaurant characteristics, and city demographics, they find that increased food truck presence corresponds with higher ratings for restaurants exhibiting greater spanning. A preregistered vignette experiment further confirms that exposure to a fusion-oriented food truck scenario leads diners to reward restaurants with diverse menus.
From Confusion to Fusion: A New Organizational Form and the Evaluation of Category Spanning in an Established Form
