Appreciation or Awareness? Differential Preferences for Category Spanning in an Online Community of Product Reviewers.

• In Event: 571 - Section on Economic Sociology Roundtables (one-hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable: Section on Economic Sociology Roundtables (one-hour). Table 01. Categories and Categorization

Abstract

Literature in organizational sociology states that category spanners - producers or products that span multiple categories – are less appealing to audiences. However, scholars also provide instances where category spanners are advantaged. As audiences may interpret the same category spanning behavior from different perspectives based on their own experience and knowledge on the market, we suggest a closer investigation of audience heterogeneity in expertise to speak to these mixed findings. When audiences broadly interact with the market domain, will they gain appreciation or awareness of category spanners? In a market where actors can simultaneously be both producers and consumers, we argue for a homophily preference – an appreciation of actors with homogeneous category spanning experience - leads knowledgeable audience members to appreciate category spanners. Using a longitudinal dataset of an online community where individuals posted reviews on a variety of pre-categorized products, we find that sharing category membership leads to positive evaluations. Moreover, we find category spanners tend to be positively evaluated by other category spanners while negatively evaluated by their more specialized peers. It is the lack of homogeneous experience between audience and actor, rather than merely category-spanning behavior, leads category spanners to be penalized.

Authors

• Evelyn Zhang, Carnegie Mellon University

• Brandy Aven, Carnegie Mellon University

• Ming De Leung, University of California-Berkeley