Management & Organization
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Item Status Motivations: Consumer and Seeker Perspectives(2017) Vesco, Robert; Waguespack, David; Agarwal, Rajshree; Business and Management: Management & Organization; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)My dissertation includes two essays which examine status motivations from different perspectives. In the first essay, I explore the motivations of actors who are seeking to increase their status. In particular, when the competitive signals become opaque, how do their behaviors change? In the second essay I look at status motivations from the perspective of the consumers. In other words, what motivates actors and audiences to reward status? Ultimately, my aim with this dissertation is to extend our understanding of status beyond whether it has an effect and into understanding what is driving those effects. I also seek to highlight the importance of heterogeneity in status motivations since populations of people are unlikely to have homogeneous reasons for pursuing status. The first essay examines how making the competitive environment opaque changes status-seekers productivity and prosocial behavior. While status competition is generally considered a positive force for increasing productivity, a growing body of research suggests it can have unintended consequences. However, the literature on status is largely divided on the motivations behind it. Management scholars tend to see status as an asset to be pursued as a means to an end while economists and psychologists focus on the ego needs associated with it. If these two groups of status-seekers react differently to changing incentives, and ex ante, we cannot identify these groups, then how can we interpret empirical results? To deal with this complexity I leverage an agent-based simulation that explores motive heterogeneity. I then exploit a natural experiment in an online community for technologists where status competition is decreased and then examine how low- versus high-status actors change their helpful behaviors and productivity. I find that productivity decreases with the less competitive (opaque) environment, but that only high-status actors decrease their helpful comments. I argue that the agent-based simulation suggests that this pattern of outcomes is likely due to the community having a heterogenous mixture of status-seekers since a homogenous community of either type of status-seeker would yield different results. The second essay turns around the motivation lens to the status-consumers rather than to the status-seekers. Why do they value status? This study examines taste-based status motives. That is, motives which are independent of quality considerations. Among this class of status audience, theory suggests that they may either be interested in status intrinsically or that they value status as a form of conspicuous consumption, but few large-scale empirical studies have addressed these different motivations. To address this challenge, I use a setting where audiences can reward high-status actors either anonymously or publicly. I find high-status actors receive a 60\% increase in deference versus their low-status counterparts. However, I find no difference between anonymous or public deference. Thus, while my findings replicate prior work on quality-based status motives, I find no evidence of taste-based status motives. One possibility for this could be that my setting does not contain sizable cohorts of people who have a taste for status. Another possibility could be that a different empirical approach is needed to tease these differing motivations apart from one another.Item Information in the Marketplace: Two Essays on Firm Strategies and Stakeholder Perceptions(2007-08-02) Pfarrer, Michael D.; Rindova, Violina P.; Business and Management: Management & Organization; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation consists of two essays that examine the role of information exchange in the marketplace and how firm strategies shape stakeholder perceptions of this information. In Essay 1, I develop a theoretical framework of Perceived Information Quality (PIQ), the extent to which stakeholders consider information useful in their evaluations of firm behavior. As PIQ increases, stakeholders' information asymmetry and evaluation costs decrease, thereby potentially leading to more transactions between the firm and its stakeholders, greater access to resources for the firm, and ultimately, a greater probability of the firm achieving economic success. However, stakeholders may perceive certain types of information about the firm to be more useful than others, depending on whether the firm is engaging in conforming or non-conforming behavior and whether information about these behaviors is received directly or through a mediated channel. Essay 2 looks at the relationships among firm intangible assets, investor perceptions, and financial outcomes. In Chapter 1, I examine the influence of firm reputation and celebrity on the likelihood of the firm announcing either a positive or negative earnings surprise. In Chapter 2, I examine the impact of reputation and celebrity on investors' reactions to the surprise announcement. Using a matched sample of 291 firms over a 15-year period, results show support for financial reputation decreasing the likelihood of positive and negative surprises, whereas one measure of firm celebrity, strategic deviance, predicts an increase only in the likelihood of negative surprises. Two additional celebrity measures, visibility and positive emotion, predict a greater likelihood of positive surprises and a lower likelihood of negative surprises respectively. In addition, results of post-hoc paired t-tests among six firm categories that group firms according to varying combinations of intangible assets show that reputation and visibility enhanced the returns of firms' announcing positive earnings surprises, but only reputation provided a buffer for negative surprises. Tests also showed that firms high in both reputation and visibility performed worst among the six groups. Thus, certain levels of reputation or visibility may enhance investor perceptions of the firm amid deviant behavior, but high levels of both may not.Item Reputation Building by New Ventures: Three Essays on Processes and Performance(2006-05-24) Petkova, Antoaneta Petkova; Gupta, Anil K.; Rindova, Violina P.; Management and Organization; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Management scholars have established the importance of reputation for firm performance but the mechanisms through which reputation can be accumulated are still to be explored. While some researchers have proposed that reputation accumulates through causally ambiguous social processes and can be built through continuous investments over time, there is little evidence regarding the nature of firm activities that may serve as strategic investments in reputation building. Prior research has focused primarily on studying reputation in large established firms that have both their prior performance, which can guide public perceptions and opinions, and substantial resources to make costly investments in product quality and advertising, which serve to increase their reputation. The tendency to study reputation among firms that already have accumulated some reputation does not allow for examining how this critical intangible asset comes into being and what factors account for the variance in the levels of reputation among young firms in an industry. This gap in the literature can be addressed by studying the process of reputation building in the context of new ventures (NVs), because such a context allows for examining the processes and different paths that may evolve from day one in the life of a firm. Specifically, my dissertation addresses these gaps in the current state of knowledge by examining the critical factors that determine the variations among NVs in their reputation building efforts, the factors that account for the relative efficiency of these efforts, and the performance implications of reputation building activities and reputational capital at different stages of the life of NVs. The dissertation is composed of three essays. The first essay describes the exploratory stage of this dissertation and provides initial insights regarding the activities that help NVs develop reputation early in their lives. The second essay provides a theoretical framework to understand the process of reputation building by NVs. I propose that NVs can build their initial reputations by investing in symbolic activities and critical resources that serve as signals of NVs' underlying quality and potential. The patterns and efficiency of such investments are likely to vary systematically depending on the founders' entrepreneurial experience and the technology and market uncertainty faced by NVs and their stakeholders. The third essay tests and provides empirical supports to the hypothesized model of reputation building in a sample of 415 information technology NVs.