Contrasting alternative explanations for the consequences of category spanning: A study of restaurant reviews and menus in San Francisco

Abstract

Recent literature on organizational category spanning demonstrates that organizations that span multiple categories on average suffer social and economic disadvantages in markets. While multiple mechanisms have been proposed to explain this finding, most studies do not test directly nor contrast these mechanisms. In this article, we contrast two of the main mechanisms proposed in the literature: the audience-side typicalitybased explanation (category spanners are atypical of each categories spanned) and the producer-side qualitybased explanation (category spanners produce lower quality output because they cannot develop expertise in any of the categories spanned). We find evidence for both mechanisms. Furthermore, we argue that quality and typicality interact such that high-quality organizations can benefit from being atypical. Finally, we contrast two kinds of spanning, "fusion" and "food court," and argue that their effects are different depending on the overall quality of the organization. Our empirical setting is the restaurant domain, and we analyze menus and reviews of 474 restaurants located in San Francisco.

Conceptual Spaces and the Consequences of Category Spanning

“…We cannot, however, tell these cases apart in our data. Future work is needed to address this distinction both theoretically and empirically, for example, by analyzing restaurant menus-see Kovács and Johnson (2014). Relatedly, we argued that spanning restaurants and books get devalued because they confuse audience members.…”

“…Admittedly, the rating might relate to multiple dimensions of value, such as food quality or service for restaurants (Kovács and Johnson (2014) found that the most important dimension is food quality), and the quality of the writing or the reputation of the author in the case of books. We do not attempt to disentangle these dimensions here.…”

An Ecology of Social Categories

“…The higher an object's typicality, the higher the probability that the agent regards it as an instance of the associated concept (Rosch and Mervis 1975;Tversky and Gati 1978). For example, restaurants with similar menus get classified alike (Kovács and Johnson 2014). This means that whether an object gets assigned a label declines monotonically with its distance from the schema/prototype.…”

What Does It Mean to Span Cultural Boundaries? Variety and Atypicality in Cultural Consumption

“…15 Parts of these data have been used previously in Hannan (2010, 2015) and Kovács and Johnson (2014), who demonstrate that restaurants that span (distant) categories receive lower ratings. we were to use the prior approach of merely counting the number of genres applied to an object.…”