WELL, GOOD: How Yelp plans to clean up one of the restaurant industry’s most dangerous flaws.

Yelp, the popular Web site that lets consumers review everything from bistros, to body shops to yoga studios, quietly began running an experiment in San Francisco over the past week. The pages for a small fraction of the city’s restaurants on the site now bear a new consumer alert.

“Following a recent inspection,” the pop-up box says, “this facility received a food safety rating that is in the bottom 5% locally, and is categorized by inspectors as ‘poor.'”

The notice is modeled off warnings that Yelp virtually slaps on businesses it suspects of soliciting fraudulent reviews. But this one, targeting all of the restaurants in that bottom 5 percent according to San Francisco health inspectors, could have a more far-reaching effect.

Harvard Business School’s Michael Luca is tracking what will happen next. With Yelp’s cooperation, he’s looking for two effects: change in how consumers behave, and change in how restaurants do. Will diners shy away from these places, even when their poor health grades clash with tasty reviews? Will the restaurants themselves be shamed into upping their scores? The latter result would be much more significant.

Here in Knoxville, local media cover bad health inspections, and it definitely has an effect.