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Broadly, my studies are organized along two parallel research streams. The first stream, developed in my dissertation, investigates the role of language in shaping the evaluation of atypicality. More specifically, I looked at how narratives can alleviate the disciplining effect of market categories. I primarily explore the intervening role of narrative in category-based evaluation in the context of platform-mediated marketplaces.

In familiarizing myself with the context, my attention was caught by the profound power asymmetries characterizing the relationship between platforms and the constellation of entrepreneurs populating their ecosystems. My second line of work, thus, is more phenomenon-based, and it seeks to capture, unpack, and frame from a conceptual standpoint some of the underlying dynamics of Platform Economy so that appropriate theorizing can proceed.

PUBLICATIONS

Platform-Dependent Entrepreneurs: Power Asymmetries, Risks, and Strategies in the Platform Economy

Online digital platforms organize and mediate an ever-increasing share of economic and societal activities. Moreover, the opportunities that platform-mediated markets offer not only attract enormous numbers of entrepreneurs, but also support the growth of entire ecosystems of producers, sellers, and specialized service providers. The increased economic and business significance of digital platforms has attracted an outpouring of studies exploring their general impact on entrepreneurial outcomes. Yet, this research has largely overlooked the power imbalance that entrepreneurs experience as members of the platform ecosystem and provided little guidance on how this enormous population of firms should compete within these ecosystems. Our analysis suggests that the conditions of engagement for platform entrepreneurs are so different from traditional entrepreneurship that these entrepreneurs are more usefully termed “platform-dependent entrepreneurs” (PDEs). Drawing upon Emerson’s power-dependence theory, we show that the power imbalance at the heart of the relationship between the platform and its ecosystem members is intrinsic to the economics and the technological architecture of digital platforms. We undertake a conceptual analysis of the sources of this power asymmetry, and we unravel the novel types of risk and uncertainty that emanate from this imbalance. Further, we explore the strategies that PDEs are developing to mitigate their dependence on these platforms. Finally, our study provides a framework for policy makers that are considering regulating platform-organized markets.

WORKING PAPERS

Competing on Platforms

The dominant online platform companies are now the most valuable companies in the world, and their growing power over other organizations is enabling them to rewrite the rules of business strategy. In the past decade, digital platforms have profoundly reorganized markets and industries and redefined the dynamics of value creation and competition. They have created marketplaces that have spawned an enormous number of platform-native startups. And as these have grown and prospered, existing businesses have felt compelled to join the platform economy, viewing participation as necessary for growth and even survival. To date, most attention to platforms has focused on understanding their advantages over traditional industrial structures and how to replicate platform successes. However, the vast majority of companies will not own platforms but, rather, will increasingly depend and compete on them. To do so effectively, platform-dependent businesses must recognize the power dynamics and risks intrinsic to platform-controlled markets. And they must develop strategies that leverage a platform’s resources while mitigating its power over them.

Tell Me Your Story and I Will Tell Your Sales: A Topic Model Analysis of Narrative Style and Firm Performance on Etsy

Strategy scholars have widely recognized the central role that narratives play in the construction of organizational identities. Moreover, storytelling is an important strategic asset that firms can leverage to inspire employees, excite investors and engage customers' attention. This chapter illustrates how advancements in computational linguistic may offer opportunities to analyze the stylistic elements that make a story more convincing. Specifically, we use a topic model to examine how narrative conventionality influences the performance of 78,758 craftsmen selling their handmade items in the digital marketplace of Etsy. Our findings provide empirical evidence that effective narratives display enough conventional features to align with audience expectations, yet preserve some uniqueness to pique audience interest. By elucidating our approach, we hope to stimulate further research at the interface of style, language, and strategy.

Something cool about atypicality, narratives, and market appeal
(Title Withheld)

  • Job Market paper

  • Revise & Resubmit at Journal of Management

  • Co-Authored with Simone Ferriani

Extensive research shows that atypical actors who fail to abide by established contextual standards and norms are subject to skepticism and face a higher risk of rejection. Indeed, atypical actors combine features, behaviors, or products in unconventional ways, thereby generating confusion and instilling doubts about their propositions' legitimacy. Nevertheless, atypicality is often viewed as a precursor to socio-cultural innovation and a strategy to expand the capacity to deliver valued goods and services. Contextualizing the conditions under which atypicality is celebrated or punished has been a significant theoretical challenge for organizational scholars interested in reconciling this tension. Thus far, scholars have focused on audience-related factors or actors’ characteristics (e.g., status and reputation). Here, we explore how atypical actors can use narratives to counteract evaluative discounts by analyzing a unique collection of 78,758 narratives from crafters on Etsy, the largest digital marketplace for handmade items. Using a combination of topic modeling, automated textual analysis, and econometrics, we show that actors with atypical product offerings who evoke conventional features in their narratives are more likely to overcome illegitimacy discounts. Moreover, more abstract language simplifies classification and provides audience members with more flexibility to interpret and understand what is being communicated.

The Platypus Puzzle: A Multidisciplinary and Integrative Framework on Atypicality in Organizational and Market Settings

  • Second dissertation paper

  • In preparation for submission at the Academy of Management Annals

  • Co-Authored with Simone Ferriani

Noncompliance with normative expectations has long fascinated management, organizational, and economic sociology scholars, fueling a lively debate among researchers interested in understanding how and why variations in behavior emerge, become manifest, and gain momentum. Yet, despite the central role atypicality plays in organizational, social, and managerial settings, it remains a relatively understudied and elusive concept, and our understanding remains selective.  We seek to address this shortcoming by developing a unifying theoretical narrative that cuts across different fields to establish a shared understanding of what atypicality is, how it operates within social systems and how it can be most effectively theorized and empirically studied going forward. To that end, we distinguish between two previously conflated forms of atypicality – incongruity and blending. The first form, incongruity, refers to the departure from the focal category's salient attributes. The second form, blending, refers to the borrowing of features from other categorical domains. Building on this renewed conceptualization, we classify research published on the topic along several dimensions of interest, such as the form of atypicality, research methods, antecedents and enabling factors of atypicality, outcomes, type of mechanism and moderators used to explain the phenomena of interest. This helps us to delineate an integrative framework for thinking about atypicality and lay out an agenda for future research that uncovers critical knowledge gaps and provides clear and specific directions for future research.

I Wasn’t Expecting That: Turning Leisure Passion into Entrepreneurial Intentions through Engaging with Digital Platforms

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  • Co-Authored with Rosa Grimaldi

Online digital platforms are increasingly becoming new contexts for business activities and generating new opportunities for start-ups and entrepreneurs. In compliance with mainstream literature on the emergence of entrepreneurial opportunities, platform entrepreneurship is nearly always presented as the outcome of intentional processes. However, there is plenty of evidence that platform entrepreneurship often happens accidentally, when people are on their way to something else as often individuals decide to engage with a digital platform for leisure, with the intent to join a community, learn new things, or express and practice their skills, talents, and passion. In this paper, we explore the relationship between passion and the emergence of unintentional entrepreneurial processes triggered through the platform.  Our empirical setting is YTTalk forum, the largest digital community for YouTubers, where we tracked the activities of 20,538 users from September 2011 through March 2020. Drawing on the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) software, we proposed a new methodological approach that makes use of language to infer passion. Our results show that community engagement over digital platforms is key for favoring the emergence of entrepreneurial intentions in passionate platforms participants. Specifically, we show that it is not the frequency of interactions (number of users’ posts), but the quality of the interactions over the platform (positive reactions and comments of appreciation generated by users’ posts) having the potential to favor the transition from pure leisure passion towards entrepreneurial intentions. Entrepreneurial intention emerges as platforms' users become aware of the attention and appreciation that they receive.

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