PhD Research Proposal Presentation: Anton Andersson
Essays on Evaluations: Trajectories, Transparency, and Desensitization
Friday, October 10, 2025, at 9:30am
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Anton Andersson, a doctoral student at 黑料社 in the area of Strategy & Organization will be presenting his research proposal entitled:
(The presentation will be conducted on Zoom)
Student Committee Co-chairs: Professor Robert David
ABSTRACT
Prestigious awards are among the most attention-grabbing and status-inducing evaluations in markets. While the audience-side effects of awards are well-documented in prior work, critical questions remain unanswered about the actions of award voters and the actor-side effects of award outcomes. First, it is often assumed that expert evaluators need to be neutral to maintain their legitimacy, but voters may be incentivized to act strategically or be subject to bias, distorting the fairness and informational value of awards as quality signals. But how and under what conditions is this likely to be the case? Second, we know little about how prestigious awards influence the behavior of the winning actors. Do they become explorative, leveraging their newfound status to pursue unconventional market opportunities, or conservative, seeking to protect their heightened standing?
I propose a three-essay dissertation design to address these questions. The first two essays investigate the question of voters' actions, while the third essay investigates the question of actors鈥� behavioral responses to winning awards. Specifically, in the first essay, I investigate whether transparency into voters' evaluations impacts their voting behaviors and, if so, what is driving that effect. In the second essay, I study how voters' familiarity with candidates and candidates' prior recognition impacts award outcomes. Finally, in the third essay, I explore how winning awards influences actors鈥� future market behaviors. I focus on how the pre-award trajectories of winners inform their post-award choices. Through these studies, I aim to provide new insights into the antecedents and consequences of social evaluations.
