PhD Seminar Series: Yang Jiang and Clara Depalma

Reputational Communities and the Social Construction of Online Organizational Reputation

Speaker: Yang Jiang (Bocconi University)

Abstract: This research challenges the dominant “online review aggregator” perspective, which assumes that an organization’s online reputation results from aggregating independent, isolated evaluations. Instead, this research argues that online reputation is socially constructed, as reviewers attend to and are influenced by prior evaluations in an environment of uncertainty. Building on this view, it is conceptualized that online rating platforms comprise multiple reputational communities. Within each community, reviewers’ evaluations progressively converge toward a shared understanding of organizational qualities. This research proposes that two structural features of a reputational community shape this convergence process: community size and the average similarity among reviewers in the evaluation dimensions they emphasize. Larger communities and greater dimensional similarity are positively related to a converging reputation. Furthermore, it argues that this convergence is pronounced when the first reviewer in a bounded-size community is of high status. Using Yelp data on U.S. restaurants, this research finds supportive evidence for the arguments. By theorizing online reputation formation as a community-level, socially influenced process, this study advances research on online organizational reputation and provides new insights into how reputational dynamics unfold in online review environments.

Performance Feedback and Goal Hierarchy: Venture Capitalists’ Profitability and Social Enterprise Investment

Speaker: Clara Depalma (Bocconi University)

Abstract: Nowadays, amateur reviewers and professional critics coexist in many markets and express their opinions on the same producers and offerings. To what extent should we expect the evaluations provided by consumers to conform to those provided by professional critics? And are all consumers equally subject to such conformity pressure? To examine these questions, we exploit a fortuitous partnership between Michelin, the editor of the most prestigious restaurant guide, and TripAdvisor, a prominent aggregator of consumer reviews for the restaurant industry. As a result of this partnership, the TripAdvisor pages of restaurants evaluated by the Michelin Guide were updated with a Michelin badge under the restaurant name and a direct link to the evaluation by Michelin inspectors. Using a difference-in-differences approach, we examine changes in reviews posted on TripAdvisor before and after the appearance of the Michelin evaluation relative to reviews posted on Yelp, a similar platform that did not introduce any Michelin-related information. Our results reveal that amateur reviewers significantly changed their evaluations when the opinion of experts became more salient. The change was reflected in both the form and substance of their reviews, with differential treatment effects depending on the status of the amateur evaluators on the review platform.