Browsing by Subject "Reputation"
Now showing 1 - 5 of 5
Results Per Page
Sort Options
Item Eagerness vs. vigilance : the effects of CEO regulatory focus on firm innovation behavior, error avoidance behavior and firm reputation(2015-05) Greenbaum, Bruce Elliot; Rindova, Violina; Bermiss, Y. Sekou; Martins, Luis L; Mayer, Kyle J; Polidoro, FranciscoI develop and empirically test a model of the effects of CEO regulatory focus on firm actions and firm reputation. I use regulatory focus theory to unpack the differences in firms’ strategic actions, specifically innovation behavior, operationalized by new product introductions, and mistake avoidance behaviors, operationalized by product recalls, and the effect of CEO regulatory focus on firm reputation. Regulatory focus theory has identified two motivators of behavior: promotion focus and prevention focus. I characterize CEO promotion focus as strategic eagerness, when CEOs influence their firms to execute actions in pursuit of accomplishments or successful "hits", and CEO prevention focus as strategic vigilance, when CEOs influence their firms to execute actions in order to avoid mistakes and to maintain a sense of safety. These different behavior profiles are theorized to result in different levels of product innovation and product recalls for firms within the U.S. automobile industry. CEO regulatory focus is also theorized to have direct or indirect effects on multiple aspects of firm reputation - specifically, firm prominence and reputation for quality. I test these hypotheses through text analysis of firm letters to shareholders and further empirical study of the global automotive industry in the U.S. from 1996-2010. The impact of regulatory focus on product introductions and product recalls and the direct and mediated effects of strategic eagerness and strategic vigilance generated mixed, but encouraging, results. This study extends the influence of CEO regulatory focus on strategic actions and expands the micro-foundational influences on firm action logics.Item Essays on certification mechanism design in strategic communications(2010-08) Xu, Hong, doctor of information, risk, and operations management; Stinchcombe, Maxwell; Whinston, Andrew B.; Mote, John; Wiseman, Thomas; Gu, BinCertifiers have a crucial role in facilitating effective communication in the online and the traditional world. As a way of generating statistically meaningful information, certification has been adopted in financial statements evaluation and more recently in various online communities as well. This dissertation examines three related issues along this common theme: online reputation market, moderation in user-generated content, and strategic communications in the market for certifications, and consists of three essays. The first essay analyzes the impact of various dispute mechanisms on online identity trading. Online identities with a good reputation profile is a valuable and tradable asset. However, with free identity creation, there is room for low quality sellers to free-ride high quality sellers. When there is a lack of incentive for sellers to maintain a good reputation, identity trading becomes ineffective. This essay focuses on the role of an auditing system, such as eBay dispute center, and shows that even a small amount of objective information from the auditors can reverse the negative result and sustain reliable reputation and identity trading. The second essay investigates the impact of moderation on the quality of information in an user-generated content (UGC) environment. In most UGC communities, content contributors have incentive to publish biased or false information. For example, companies hire people to write positive reviews about themselves. This essay establishes a framework for the mechanism design of moderation, and provides insight on how to optimally allocate moderation resource. The third essay examines a market for certification and certifiers' strategic reporting behaviors. The central question is how to induce certifiers to provide statistically meaningful information to investors when they are paid by their client firms. We provide insights on how certifier competition plays an role in firms' certifier choice, how certifiers degrade their accuracies to achieve maximum profit, and how the legal environment impacts the information quality.Item Essays on reputation(Texas A&M University, 2006-10-30) Cho, Jung HunThis dissertation examines reputation, the belief of the decision maker about types of advisors, in incomplete information games with multiple advisors. The decision maker believes that an advisor can be one of two types ?????? an advisor who is biased towards suggesting any particular advice (bad advisor) or an advisor who has the same preferences as the decision maker (good advisor). I explain why it is not always beneficial for the decision maker to seek advice from two advisors simultaneously compared to seeking advice from a single advisor. It is shown that a strong concern for one??????s reputation not to be perceived as a bad advisor can make the good advisor sometimes give wrong advice. Also, if each type of advisor considers his future important, the decision maker is better off having a single advisor. Then I show that, when dealing with two advisors, it is better for the decision maker to seek advice simultaneously since the possibility of obtaining information is lower in sequential cheap talk. I also examine how an individual??????s perception of what he thinks of himself (self-reputation) and what others think of him regarding his ability to resist temptation (perception of reputation) affect his actions. It is shown that higher self-reputation and higher perception of reputation help in making resolutions and keeping up with them both in the short and the long run. However, this result requires that individuals find it relatively easy to resist temptation. Also, even those who find it hard to resist temptation can sustain their resolution after telling friends about the resolution in the short run if they value the future more than the present.Item Essays on reputation and repeated games(2015-05) Sperisen, Benjamin Leonard; Wiseman, Thomas E., 1974-; Alvisi, Lorenzo; Bhaskar, V.; Stahl, Dale; Thomas, CarolineThis dissertation consists of three essays on reputation and repeated games. Reputation models typically assume players have full memory of past events, yet in many applications this assumption does not hold. In the first chapter, I explore two different relaxations of the assumption that history is perfectly observed in the context of Ely and Välimäki's (2003) mechanic game, where reputation (with full history observation) is clearly bad for all players. First I consider "limited history," where short-run players see only the most recent T periods. For large T, the full history equilibrium behavior always holds due to an "echo" effect (for high discount factors); for small T, the repeated static equilibrium exists. Second I consider "fading history," where short-run players randomly sample past periods with probabilities that "fade" toward zero for older periods. When fading is faster than a fairly lax threshold, the long-run player always acts myopically, a result that holds more generally for reputation games where the long-run player has a strictly dominant stage game action. This finding suggests that reputational incentives may be too weak to affect long-run player behavior in some realistic word-of-mouth environments. The second chapter develops general theoretical tools to study incomplete information games where players observe only finitely many recent periods. I derive a recursive characterization of the set of equilibrium payoffs, which allows analysis of both stationary and (previously unexplored) non-stationary equilibria. I also introduce "quasi-Markov perfection," an equilibrium refinement which is a necessary condition of any equilibrium that is "non-fragile" (purifiable), i.e., robust to small, additively separable and independent perturbations of payoffs. These tools are applied to two examples. The first is a product choice game with 1-period memory of the firm's actions, obtaining a complete characterization of the exact minimum and maximum purifiable equilibrium payoffs for almost all discount factors and prior beliefs on an "honest" Stackelberg commitment type, which shows that non-stationary equilibria expand the equilibrium set. The second is the same game with long memory: in all stationary and purifiable equilibria, the long-run player obtains exactly the Stackelberg payoff so long as the memory is longer than a threshold dependent on the prior. These results show that the presence of the honest type (even for arbitrarily small prior beliefs) qualitatively changes the equilibrium set for any fixed discount factor above a threshold independent of the prior, thereby not requiring extreme patience. The third chapter studies the question of why drug trafficking organizations inflict violence on each other, and why conflict breaks out under some government crackdowns and not others, in a repeated games context. Violence between Mexican drug cartels soared following the government's anti-cartel offensive starting in 2006, but not under previous crackdowns. I construct a theoretical explanation for these observations and previous empirical research. I develop a duopoly model where the firms have the capacity to make costly attacks on each other. The firms use the threat of violence to incentivize inter-cartel cooperation, and under imperfect monitoring, violence occurs on the equilibrium path of a high payoff equilibrium. When a "corrupt" government uses the threat of law enforcement as a punishment for uncooperative behavior, violence is not needed as frequently to achieve high payoffs. When government cracks down indiscriminately, the firms may return to frequent violence as a way of ensuring cooperation and high payoffs, even if the crackdown makes drug trafficking otherwise less profitable.Item Information triage : dual-process theory in credibility judgments of web-based resources(2010-05) Aumer-Ryan, Paul R.; Dillon, Andrew; Robinson, Daniel H.; Bias, Randolph G.; Rice-Lively, Mary Lynn; Geisler, GaryThis dissertation describes the credibility judgment process using social psychological theories of dual-processing, which state that information processing outcomes are the result of an interaction “between a fast, associative information- processing mode based on low-effort heuristics, and a slow, rule-based information processing mode based on high-effort systematic reasoning” (Chaiken & Trope, 1999, p. ix). Further, this interaction is illustrated by describing credibility judgments as a choice between examining easily identified peripheral cues (the messenger) and content (the message), leading to different evaluations in different settings. The focus here is on the domain of the Web, where ambiguous authorship, peer- produced content, and the lack of gatekeepers create an environment where credibility judgments are a necessary routine in triaging information. It reviews the relevant literature on existing credibility frameworks and the component factors that affect credibility judgments. The online encyclopedia (instantiated as Wikipedia and Encyclopedia Britannica) is then proposed as a canonical form to examine the credibility judgment process. The two main claims advanced here are (1) that information sources are composed of both message (the content) and messenger (the way the message is delivered), and that the messenger impacts perceived credibility; and (2) that perceived credibility is tempered by information need (individual engagement). These claims were framed by the models proposed by Wathen & Burkell (2002) and Chaiken (1980) to forward a composite dual process theory of credibility judgments, which was tested by two experimental studies. The independent variables of interest were: media format (print or electronic); reputation of source (Wikipedia or Britannica); and the participant’s individual involvement in the research task (high or low). The results of these studies encourage a more nuanced understanding of the credibility judgment process by framing it as a dual-process model, and showing that certain mediating variables can affect the relative use of low-effort evaluation and high- effort reasoning when forming a perception of credibility. Finally, the results support the importance of messenger effects on perceived credibility, implying that credibility judgments, especially in the online environment, and especially in cases of low individual engagement, are based on peripheral cues rather than an informed evaluation of content.