Business Commons^™

Three Essays On Firm Behaviors In Online Market Platforms, Erfan Rezvani

Doctoral Dissertations

Across many online market platforms, customer reviews have become a prevailing mechanism to evaluate firms and disseminate information about the quality of their products/services. While prior research has well-documented the impact of such customer-generated information on firm performance such as sales (e.g. Chevalier & Mayzlin 2006, Liu, 2006), understanding how firms react to customer evaluations generates an interesting yet an underexplored topic for research. This dissertation, through three studies, aims to investigate how customer reviews tat are posted on online platforms shape how firms learn, communicate, and compete. Chapter 1 shows that learning from own experience follows an inverted U-shaped …

Law School News: Remembering Rwu Laws Founding Dean 9-10-2019, Roger Williams University School Of Law

Life of the Law School (1993- )

No abstract provided.

Reputation Concerns And Slow-Moving Capital, Steven G. Malliaris, Hongjun Yan

Hongjun Yan

Our paper shows that fund managers' reputation concerns induce a preference over the skewness of strategy returns. This preference is non-monotonic in the manager's reputation level: While managers with average reputations prefer negatively skewed strategies, those with very high or very low reputations prefer the opposite. Our model also explains why only negatively skewed strategies tend to suffer from slow-moving capital: A subtle but natural consequence of adopting negatively skewed strategies is that after poor performance, managers' reputations recover slowly. In the meantime, they are unable to raise capital, leaving attractive opportunities unexploited.

Reputational Considerations Within Prosocial Behavior, Rachel Gershon

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Consumers and companies often consider the welfare of others when making decisions. Consumers might spend their money donating to meaningful causes or choose to purchase from socially responsible companies. Companies must also choose whether and how to prioritize behaving Prosocially or “giving back”. One reason that both companies and individuals behave prosocially is to be viewed positively by others, or in other words, to gain charitable credit. In my research, I explore this impression management motivation behind prosocial behavior.

In Chapter one, I show that low-warmth actors are often assumed to lack communal (or other-oriented) intentions, even when acting generously. …

Toward A Horizontal Fiduciary Duty In Corporate Law, Asaf Eckstein, Gideon Parchomovsky

All Faculty Scholarship

Fiduciary duty is arguably the single most important aspect of our corporate law system. It consists of two distinct sub-duties—a duty of care and a duty of loyalty—and it applies to all directors and corporate officers. Yet, under extant law, the duty only applies vertically, in the relationship between directors and corporate officers and the firm. At present, there exists no horizontal fiduciary duty: directors and corporate officers owe no fiduciary duty to each other. Consequently, if one of them fails her peers, they cannot seek direct legal recourse against her even when they stand to suffer significant reputational and …

The Impact Of Social Media On Reputational Risk, Samantha Claire Hamilton

Senior Honors Projects

In the era of social media, reputation is a crucial feature of business activity and can help companies attract customers and reach the economies of scale and scope that justify their investment. Reputational risk is a challenging topic. This is partly because it involves temporal perception and stock market frenzy like we saw with the first bubble, Tulipmania, and the Dotcom Bubble. These potential threats have strengthened due

to social media platforms playing a main role in these “panic-in, panic out” investing behaviors. As we see from many company crises, this reputational value can grow and then disappear in moments. …

Reputation Concerns Under At-Will Employment, Jian Sun, Dong Wei

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

We study a continuous-time model of long-run employment relationship with fixed wage and at-will firing; that is, termination of the relationship is non-contractible. Depending on his type, the worker either always works hard, or can freely choose his effort level. The firm does not know the worker’s type and the monitoring is imperfect. We show that, in the unique Markov equilibrium, as the worker’s reputation worsens, his job becomes less secure and the strategic worker works harder. We further demonstrate that the relationship between average productivity and job insecurity is U shaped, which is consistent with typical findings in the …

Essays On Financial Incentives, Tyson D. Van Alfen

Theses and Dissertations--Finance and Quantitative Methods

In my first chapter, I use a novel dataset of customer reviews from Amazon.com to study the impact of managerial myopia on product market reputation. Using exogenous variation due to the timing of CEO equity vesting events, I show that short-term incentive shocks predict declines in reputation. A changing product market lineup and a deterioration of existing products are two mechanisms through which reputation is affected. The effect is larger when the CEO has other short-term concerns and when the firm has a low reputation in the product market. However, higher advertising expenses mitigate the negative reputational effect among consumers. …

Good Guys Can Finish First: How Brand Reputation Affects Extension Evaluations, Sarah Lefebvre, Zachary Johnson, Huifang Mao, Jaishankar Ganesh

Faculty & Staff Research and Creative Activity

This research investigates how consumer evaluations of brand extensions are affected by two distinct types of brand reputation: a reputation for social responsibility built through commitments to societal obligations, versus a reputation for ability developed by delivering quality offerings. Through six studies, we establish that while the two reputation types equivalently influence high fit brand extensions, a reputation for social responsibility (vs. ability) leads to more favorable responses toward low fit brand extensions by inducing a desire to support and help the company that has acted to benefit consumers. Furthermore, the facilitative effect of social responsibility on low fit brand …

Enhancing Consumer Engagement In An Online Brand Community Via User Reputation Signals: A Multi-Method Analysis, Sara Hanson, Lan Jiang, Darren Dahl

Marketing Faculty Publications

Generating and maintaining consumers’ engagement in online brand communities is critical for marketing managers to enhance relationships and gain customer loyalty. In this research, we investigate how the type of signal used to indicate user reputation can enhance (or diminish) consumers’ community engagement. Specifically, we explore differences in perceptions of points (i.e., point accrual systems), labels (i.e., descriptive, hierarchical identification systems), and badges (i.e., descriptive, horizontally-ordered identification systems). We argue that reputation signals vary in the degree to which they can provide role clarity—the presence of user roles that deliver information about expected behaviors within a group. Across several studies, …

Improving Human Rights Compliance In Supply Chains, Kishanthi Parella

Scholarly Articles

Corporations try to convince us that they are good global citizens: “brands take stands” by engaging in cause philanthropy; CEOs of prominent corporations tackle a variety of issues; and social values drive marketing strategies for goods and services. But despite this rhetoric, corporations regularly fall short in their conduct. This is especially true in supply chains where a number of human rights abuses frequently occur. One solution is for corporations to engage in meaningful human rights due diligence that involves monitoring human rights, reporting on social and environmental performance, undertaking impact assessments, and consulting with groups whose human rights they …

Third Party Employment Branding: What Are Its Signaling Dimensions, Mechanisms, And Sources?, Brian R. Dineen, Greet Van Hoye, Filip Lievens, Lindsay Mechem Rosokha

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Massive shifts in the recruitment landscape, the continually changing nature of work and workers, and extraordinary technological progress have combined to enable unparalleled advances in how current and prospective employees receive and process information about organizations. Once the domain of internal organizational public relations and human resources (HR) teams, most employment branding has moved beyond organizations’ control. This chapter provides a conceptual framework pertaining to third party employment branding, defined as communications, claims, or status-based classifications generated by parties outside of direct company control that shape, enhance, and differentiate organizations’ images as favorable or unfavorable employers. Specifically, the authors first …