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 …

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. …

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. …