Are information intermediaries subject to social influence and competitive pressures from other information intermediaries? If so, how do these forces impact the information they provide? We examine these questions in two contexts:... more
Are information intermediaries subject to social influence and competitive pressures from other information intermediaries? If so, how do these forces impact the information they provide? We examine these questions in two contexts: reviews by professional film and video game critics. Consistent with prior literature examining securities analysts, our study suggests that product critics face simultaneous and opposing pressures to converge and diverge. Unlike securities analysts, who tend to converge on the forecasts of other analysts, our findings provide evidence that film and video game critics tend to differentiate from the reviews of other critics. We examine all movie and video game reviews posted on Metacritic.com for movies and video games released in theaters from 2011 through 2014. We attempt to isolate the effect of social influence and competitive forces between critics by exploiting variation in the observability of reviews based on their publication dates. We use the difference between critics’ reviews when they are published on the same day as a baseline case, and then examine how those differences change when one critic publishes a review after the other critic. Our within-product and within-critic analyses suggest that critics are subject to social influence and competitive pressures. Critics’ reviews are more negative than they would otherwise be when they can observe the reviews of other critics. This effect is heightened as the competitive overlap between the critics increases.
With a process perspective based on a framework derived from several disciplines, we theoretically discuss how friendship dynamics in founding teams may affect a business. We develop a conceptual model that considers the different nature... more
With a process perspective based on a framework derived from several disciplines, we theoretically discuss how friendship dynamics in founding teams may affect a business. We develop a conceptual model that considers the different nature of exchanges in business and friendship, which may serve as a useful starting base for future investigation (in the Appendix we report some measures of friendship). We then examine an exemplary case. We focus on group cohesiveness (a proxy for friendship), decision-making, and organization of an Italian technology-based firm's founding team over time and explore the process of generating creative ideas and implementing innovation. Our speculative findings show that chaos does not necessarily favor creativity and innovation: while low group cohesiveness leads to disorganization because business norms prevail over friendship ones, high group cohesiveness creates structure in the organization that sustains the generation of creative outcomes by enhancing the role of friendship norms in decision-making. We explain this finding in the light of the principle of reciprocity of exchanges.
