【会议】Crying Over Spoilt Milk: The Negative Consequences of a Stigmatized Company’s Assurances 2022-11-02
发布者：沙晓燕 发布时间：2022-10-28 浏览次数：10
Meeting Time：1:00 PM -2:00 PM, Nov. 2, 2022
Meeting Location：Biz Hall 317
Speaker: Prof. Juan Ma
Prof. Juan Ma is an Assistant Professor of Strategy at INSEAD. Her research tackles institutional distrust, the collective distrust in business institutions due to rampant rent-seeking and corruption, as well as its implications on firm behaviour. Using emerging economies as an empirical window, one stream of her work tackles product market failures, examining the collective scepticism and distrust in product market institutions in the context of product safety scandals. Another stream of her work studies institutional corruption in financial markets, with a focus on the rent-seeking behaviour of board directors and securities regulators. Professor Ma’s work has been published in reputed academic journals, including the Strategic Management Journal, and cited by media outlets including the Financial Times and Forbes. Professor Ma earned a doctorate in Business Administration with a specialisation in Strategy from Harvard University, and received the Wyss Award for outstanding doctoral dissertation in business administration, as well as the Weiss Family Program Fund for outstanding research in development economics.
Abstract: Corporate scandals create legitimacy losses for implicated firms. But they also spillover onto bystander firms regardless of whether they are guilty of the same conduct. What would bystander firms do in the wake of such scandals? We run field experiments to study how a bystander firm, stigmatized by China’s melamine milk scandal in 2008, attempted to manage consumer impressions of its product. We show that these attempts instead prompted consumers to question the firm’s practices and make less purchases. In communities where the scandal was more salient, this negative effect was even greater. We thus provide evidence for the so-called ‘self-promoter paradox’ by demonstrating that firms’ legitimation efforts can be counterproductive and might be perceived as evidence that the firm needs to justify itself.
