Out of Sight, Out of Mind? Evidence of Perceptual Factors in the Multiple-Category Discount

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Leung, Ming D.; Sharkey, Amanda J.
• 署名单位: University of California System; University of California Berkeley; University of Chicago
• 刊物名称: ORGANIZATION SCIENCE
• ISSN/ISSBN: 1047-7039
• DOI: 10.1287/orsc.2013.0828
• 发表日期: 2014
• 页码: 171-184
• 关键词: Categorization; collective production market; Peer-to-peer lending; natural experiment; Difference-in-difference

摘要

Extant work shows that market actors who span multiple social categories tend to be devalued relative to their more specialized peers. Scholars typically explain this pattern of results with one of two arguments. Some contend that perceptual factors-namely, the difficulties that buyers have in making sense of category spanners-contribute to the observed pattern of devaluation. Others argue that the penalty for category-spanning stems from the fact that those who do not focus their efforts narrowly tend to offer products that are of lower quality. Because these two mechanisms often co-occur, it has been difficult to provide definitive evidence of the perceptually driven component of the multiple-category penalty. We employ a natural experiment on a peer-to-peer crowd-funding website to address this gap. Difference-indifference analyses on matched samples show that category spanning is perceived negatively and can result in devaluation, even in the absence of underlying quality differences. This result supports the argument that perceptual issues contribute to the penalty for category spanning.