Catering to the crowd: Three essays on social judgments and strategic action.

摘要

Today's organizations operate in a global arena where news and opinion spread like brushfire. The blossoming of social media, in particular, has necessitated managers' close attention to their firm's reputation, status, and other "social judgments". This has prompted a surge of scholarly interest in this domain, but a great deal of work remains. I target several of those conceptual voids in this dissertation. In Essay 1, I conduct a review of the available literature on how social judgments influence strategic action, classifying social judgments by their valence---i.e., favorable and unfavorable--and the exigency they present to the firm---i.e., opportunity or threat. I emphasize that while most prior research has addressed how favorable social judgments present opportunities and unfavorable social judgments present threats, strategic actions can also be motivated by threats arising from favorable social judgments and opportunities arising from unfavorable social judgments. I recommend these counterintuitive scenarios as a focus of future research. In Essay 2, I underscore that although a firm's reputation for quality tends to self-perpetuate over time, a firm's product quality can diverge from this quality track record, and that these "reputation surprises" have critical implications for subsequent stakeholder perceptions. I argue that a positive reputation surprise will improve subsequent perceptions of quality and a negative reputation surprise will worsen them, but organizations can employ "strategic noise" to diminish these effects. These predictions are supported by empirical results from a sample of 42,861 videos from 196 YouTube channels. In Essay 3, I argue that rather than encouraging greater exploration, a firm's reputation for quality discourages subsequent product novelty as managers work to protect their quality-based track record. I also argue that the firm's reputation for novelty positively moderates this relationship, encouraging novel products despite favorable reputation for quality. Finally, I explore a third contingency factor---home country culture---arguing that Japanese-origin firms will be less influenced than American firms by these effects of reputation for quality and novelty. This is largely supported by empirical results from a sample of 5,147 video game releases by 84 firms. The final chapter concludes with implications for future research.