Jihyeon Kim

Stigma stemming from managerial scandals often spreads beyond the implicated transgressor and contaminates other actors via stigma by association. We study how associative stigma resulting from scandals involving managerial misconduct affects subordinate worker careers. We extend prior work by distinguishing between managerial misconduct in the professional domain from managerial misconduct in the personal domain and theorize that this distinction will affect the severity of associative stigma, audience evaluations, and associated workers’ labor market outcomes. Our multimethod empirical approach combines archival analysis of administrative employment records with a series of preregistered, randomized vignette experiments. Our archival analysis demonstrates that workers associated with managers who engage in misconduct sort into organizations with a history of managerial misconduct. The magnitude of this effect is amplified when associative stigma arises from managerial misconduct in the personal domain, a pattern driven by the fact that associative stigma arising from managerial misconduct in the professional domain tends to carry a relatively stronger labor market penalty and increased likelihood of worker exit from the industry. Our experimental studies, which measure employment intentions of workers and hiring intentions of employers, suggest that the psychological mechanism of stigma apprehension plays a role in facilitating the sorting that we observe, a result consistent with the interpretation that sorting emerges from greater tolerance of actors stigmatized by association rather than a taste for misconduct and thus, affirmative assortative matching. These findings contribute to the stigma literature by showing how stigma by association effects vary across audiences and linking this variation to sorting outcomes. This paper was accepted by Isabel Fernandez-Mateo, organizations. Funded: The authors thank the Blake Family Fund for Ethics, Leadership, and Governance at Purdue University for supporting this research. Supplemental Material: The online appendix and data files are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2023.00075 .

We investigate the influence of financial resources on a firm’s propensity for misconduct. Previous studies offer conflicting predictions regarding the relationship, and much of the empirical evidence suffers from issues like selection, measurement error, reverse causality, and omitted variable bias. Leveraging a difference-in-differences design, we first examine quasirandom fluctuations in retailers’ financial resources resulting from large windfalls from selling winning lottery tickets. Our results suggest that an increase in financial resources from selling a large winning lottery ticket reduces retailers’ tobacco sales to minors. Next, to rule in strain theory and to rule out alternative explanations, we leverage a second natural experiment, heterogeneity analysis, an alternate measure of misconduct, and an online randomized experiment. In doing so, we provide plausibly causal evidence on the relationship between a firm’s financial resources and its propensity for misconduct and provide potentially useful findings for policymakers and regulators. Funding: This work was supported by the Blake Family Fund for Ethics, Leadership, and Governance at Purdue University. Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2023.17541 .

We examined whether encouraging managers to attend to underlying principles in negotiation training examples rather than contextual specifics fosters openness to learning and enhances subsequent knowledge transfer to new negotiation situations. In an experimental study, 420 managers read a negotiation case study example set in a familiar or unfamiliar industry and answered either broadening or narrowing questions about an example. Managers given broadening questions about an example set in an unfamiliar industry were more open to learning than managers who were asked narrowing questions about an example set in a familiar industry. Openness to learning in turn fostered successfully applying the key negotiation principle to resolve a subsequent face‐to‐face negotiation. The findings suggest that negotiation training for professionals is unlikely to meet its intended purpose if it relies on offering managers examples set in their own industries and encouraging them to answer questions about the contextual specifics of those examples.