Professor Daniel Ho weighs in on the effectiveness of restaurant rating systems in encouraging sanitary practices for ​The Seattle Times.  

Spurred in part by a two-time victim of E. coli food poisoning, King County health officials have agreed to launch a new restaurant grading system that allows customers to get a look at the inspection status when they walk in the door.

Instead of searching through what critics say is a convoluted and confusing website, diners at the county’s 12,000 restaurants and food trucks will find storefront signs to tell at a glance where it’s safe to eat.

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Daniel E. Ho, a Stanford University law professor who has studied 700,000 restaurant inspections in 10 jurisdictions, including New York and San Diego, said there are challenges to creating a meaningful inspection ratings system.

“Despite grading’s great promise, we show that the regulatory design, implementation and practice suffer from serious flaws: jurisdictions fudge more than nudge,” he wrote in a 2012 paper in The Yale Law Journal.

In some places with grading systems, nearly every restaurant gets an A. Scores can be poor predictors of cleanliness down the road, Ho said. There also are questions about the consistency of scores among inspectors.

“What our research suggests is that there are some first-order issues to solve before simply transforming scores into grades,” said Ho, who is serving as an unpaid consultant to King County on the new ratings system.