EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

“Actual” and Perceptual Effects of Category Spanning

Giacomo Negro () and Ming D. Leung ()
Additional contact information
Giacomo Negro: Goizueta Business School, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia 30322
Ming D. Leung: Haas School of Business, University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, California 94720

Organization Science, 2013, vol. 24, issue 3, 684-696

Abstract: Literature to date has demonstrated that producers and products spanning multiple categories have inferior market performance. However, two related but distinct explanations exist as to the source of such a discount. One explanation suggests that “actual” skills are degraded when producers attempt to engage across diverse categories. Another explanation involves perceptual fit to category representations held by an audience as the cause. These two explanations tend to be confounded in archival studies because external observers, responsible for the evaluation of market performance, are often aware of both the identity of producers and the underlying characteristics of their products. This leaves researchers unable to empirically separate effects. We present an analysis conducted in a setting in which it was possible to distinguish the two mechanisms: critics’ ratings of the same wines through “blind” and “nonblind” tastings. The findings indicate that after controlling for the value of ratings assigned blindly, the wines made by wineries spanning styles continue to receive lower ratings in the nonblind situation.

Keywords: organization theory; organizational ecology; market categories (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (22)

Downloads: (external link)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1287/orsc.1120.0764 (application/pdf)

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:inm:ororsc:v:24:y:2013:i:3:p:684-696

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Organization Science from INFORMS Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Asher ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-19
Handle: RePEc:inm:ororsc:v:24:y:2013:i:3:p:684-696