Michelin Is Coming to Town: Organizational Responses to Status Shocks

Saverio Dave Favaron, Giada Di Stefano and Rodolphe Durand
Additional contact information
Saverio Dave Favaron: SKEMA Business School
Giada Di Stefano: Bocconi University - Department of Management and Technology
Rodolphe Durand: HEC Paris

No 1431, HEC Research Papers Series from HEC Paris

Abstract: What happens in the aftermath of the introduction of a new status ranking? In this study, we exploit the unique empirical opportunity generated by the release of the first edition of the Michelin Guide for Washington D.C. in the fall of 2016. We build on prior work on rankings as insecurity-inducing devices by suggesting that newly awarded high-status actors modify their self-presentation attributes to fit with what they believe audiences expect from the elite. Our results show that, depending on their standing prior to Michelin’s entry, restaurants acted upon different attributes of their self-presentation. Restaurants with high prior standing emphasized attributes that channeled authenticity and exclusivity, which may imply their Michelin designation triggered operational changes. Actors with low prior standing, on the other hand, acted on descriptive attributes that did not necessarily imply operational changes and could be easily manipulated to signal their belonging among the elite. We contribute to research on status and conformity by disentangling the sources and types of conformity behaviors that newly awarded high-status actors deploy.

Keywords: status; evaluation; conformity; difference in differences; gourmet cuisine (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: M10 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 66 pages
Date: 2021-10-08
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3937987 Full text (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ebg:heccah:1431

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in HEC Research Papers Series from HEC Paris HEC Paris, 78351 Jouy-en-Josas cedex, France. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Antoine Haldemann ().