PUBLICATIONS

Let Us Not Speak of Them, but Look and Pass? Organizational Responses to Online Reviews
[Favaron S.D., Di Stefano G.] – Published in Organization Science (2025)
https://pubsonline.informs.org/doi/abs/10.1287/orsc.2020.14091

Abstract
In a world where five stars have become the standard for evaluating many transactions, and consumers turn to the crowd for guidance when making a wide variety of choices, organizations cannot dismiss online reviews as inconsequential. And while we know a lot about how organizations respond to reviews online, there has been a lack of systematic evidence showing how organizations behave in response to online feedback once their screens are turned off. This paper leverages a novel combination of insights from a lab-in-the-field experiment, an archival study, and two rounds of qualitative interviews in the French restaurant industry to examine online and offline responses to reviewer feedback. We identify characteristics of the review, the restaurant, and the respondent that influenced when restaurants in our sample were more likely to align their actions online and offline, and when they were more likely to decouple them—i.e., posting an online response promising to take corrective action while having no intention to change how the restaurant operates “in real life”. We conclude by speculating on potential mechanisms behind our respondents’ reactions, and discussing our contribution to literature on producer reactivity and the symbolic management of change.

Michelin is coming to town: Organizational responses to status shocks.
[Favaron S.D., Di Stefano G., Durand R.] – Published in Management Science (2022)
https://pubsonline.informs.org/doi/abs/10.1287/mnsc.2021.4210

Abstract
What happens in the aftermath of the introduction of a new status ranking? In this study, we exploit the unique empirical opportunity generated by the release of the first edition of the Michelin Guide for Washington D.C. in the fall of 2016. We build on prior work on rankings as insecurity-inducing devices by suggesting that newly awarded high-status actors modify their self-presentation attributes to fit with what they believe audiences expect from the elite. Our results show that, depending on their standing prior to Michelin’s entry, restaurants acted upon different attributes of their self-presentation. Restaurants with high prior standing emphasized attributes that channeled authenticity and exclusivity, which may imply their Michelin designation triggered operational changes. Actors with low prior standing, on the other hand, acted on descriptive attributes that did not necessarily imply operational changes and could be easily manipulated to signal their belonging among the elite. We contribute to research on status and conformity by disentangling the sources and types of conformity behaviors that newly awarded high-status actors deploy.