The Consumer Z Score: A Methodology for Auditing Public Reputation Against Government Records

Shawn Redd

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: Consumer decisions about regulated facilities — child care centers, nursing homes, surgical centers, aviation operators — are overwhelmingly guided by public star ratings and user reviews. These reputation signals, while widely accessible, are opinion-based, subject to solicitation and management by the reviewed entity, and structurally disconnected from the mandatory government records that document licensing, inspection, enforcement, and safety outcomes. This paper describes the Consumer Z Score™, a composite metric that audits an entity's public reputation against its official government record and surfaces divergence between the two. We describe the four-layer data architecture, the ten-point scoring methodology, the records-layer grading system (A–F), and the design principles that maintain analytical independence. The methodology is applied to a database of 166,000+ US facilities across eleven regulated industries. We argue that the systematic divergence between reviews and records — measurable across verticals — represents an information asymmetry harmful to consumer welfare, and that surfacing it requires a methodology distinct from both review aggregation and regulatory reporting

Keywords: consumer protection; reputation auditing; government records; information asymmetry; facility safety; review integrity; composite scoring (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O1 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026-07-27
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