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Would you like to be left exclusively in the care of robots in your old age? Robots have been working in our factories, painting cars, assembling tiny components and mixing dangerous chemicals for decades. In the new era, service robots have begun working alongside humans in cleaning, medicine, farming and policing. Now robots are being given the intimate jobs of care and companionship for our elderly. Should we welcome such developments? Could a robot empathize and care for us in the way that a human could? Can we trust robots and robot manufacturers with such important and life-defining roles? Adapted from the source document.

Organizations are increasingly subject to rating and ranking by third-party evaluators. Research in this area tends to emphasize the direct effects of ratings systems that occur when ratings give key audiences, such as consumers or investors, more information about a rated firm. Yet, ratings systems may also indirectly influence organizations when the collective presence of more rated peers alters the broader institutional and competitive milieu. Rated firms may be more responsive to ratings systems when surrounded by more rated peers, and ratings may generate diffuse or spillover effects even among unrated firms. We test these arguments by analyzing how rated and unrated firms change their pollution behavior when more firms in their peer group are rated on environmental performance. Results indicate that the presence of more rated peers is often associated with emissions reductions. This relationship varies, however, by whether a firm was rated, whether the rating was positive or negative (if rated), and, often, features of the competitive and regulatory environment.

Although increases in status often lead to more favorable inferences about quality in subsequent evaluations, in this paper, we examine a setting in which an increase to an actor's status results in less favorable quality evaluations, contrary to what much of sociological and management theory would predict. Comparing thousands of reader reviews on Goodreads.com of 64 English-language books that either won or were short-listed for prestigious book awards between 2007 and 2011, we find that prizewinning books tend to attract more readers following the announcement of an award and that readers' ratings of award-winning books tend to decline more precipitously following the announcement of an award relative to books that were named as finalists but did not win. We explain this surprising result, focusing on two mechanisms whereby signals of quality that tend to promote adoption can subsequently have a negative impact on evaluation. First, we propose that the audience evaluating a high-status actor or object tends to shift as a result of a public status shock, like an award, increasing in number but also in diverse tastes. We outline how this shift might translate into less favorable evaluations of quality. Second, we show that the increase in popularity that tends to follow a status shock is off-putting to some, also resulting in more negative evaluations. We show that our proposed mechanisms together explain the negative effect of status on evaluations in the context of the literary world.

Prior work has emphasized the role of positive attention spillovers in driving cost advantages for high-status firms, with exchange partners offering preferential terms to high-status organizations because they anticipate benefits. Yet, spillovers from a client to a supplier may also be negative. These negative spillovers can be exacerbated when high-status actors are involved, because of the high level of publicity they attract. In this paper, we propose that suppliers' concerns about negative attention are an important contingent factor determining whether high-status firms enjoy cost advantages or, instead, pay a premium. We expect that when suppliers anticipate that negative spillovers are more likely than positive ones and when they enjoy some bargaining power over their clients, a positive relationship between status and costs will result. To test this argument, we analyze fees paid by clients of varying status levels in the U.S. market for audit services. Consistent with our theory, we find that (1) high-status clients are charged more than their lower status peers and (2) the media attention clients receive does mediate this relationship. Indicative of the role of the supplier's expectation of negative spillovers and their bargaining power, we also demonstrate that the positive relationship becomes stronger when auditors view clients as presenting a greater risk of future negative events and when clients have more bargaining power. Our efforts at theoretical integration result in a fuller picture of the role of status in shaping a firm's costs, suggesting that status involves advantages in some settings but disadvantages in others. Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2021.15814 .

Mandated gender wage gap disclosure laws are an increasingly popular but relatively untested solution to gender-based compensation inequalities. Scholars and policymakers alike have argued that disclosure will lead to greater social accountability—either reputational harm for firms revealing large disparities or benefit for more-egalitarian organizations. Yet little research has directly tested this central assumption. We advance understanding of this issue by examining reactions from a key constituency affected by pay gaps: employees. We analyze the existence, magnitude, and persistence of changes in employees' public affective evaluations of their employers on the review site Glassdoor in the wake of pay gap disclosures prompted by new regulations in the United Kingdom. We find a short-lived improvement in employees' evaluations of organizations reporting pay parity, consistent with a reputational boost. At the same time, we find little evidence of a negative post-disclosure reaction from employees of firms reporting sizable gender-based disparities. We take an abductive approach to investigate these surprising findings, probing key assumptions and the viability of different plausible explanations for the results. We consider how our empirical findings can inform the development of novel theory in the areas of gender wage inequality, reputation, and transparency.

We advance a theory of how organizational characteristics, in particular the structure of opportunity within organizations, shape the decision to become an entrepreneur. Established organizations play an important yet understudied role in the entrepreneurial process, because they shape the environment within which individuals may choose to enter self-employment. Yet, despite the fact that sociologists have long recognized that inequality within organizations plays an important role in career attainment and mobility, we lack an understanding of how it shapes the pursuit of entrepreneurial opportunities. We develop a formal model in which entrepreneurial choice is driven by differences in the arrival rate of various types of advancement opportunities. Entrepreneurship then arises as a result of matching processes between workers and employers, as well as the features of opportunity structures in paid employment. Analyses using Danish census data provide support for empirical implications derived from the model.

Extant work shows that market actors who span multiple social categories tend to be devalued relative to their more specialized peers. Scholars typically explain this pattern of results with one of two arguments. Some contend that perceptual factors—namely, the difficulties that buyers have in making sense of category spanners—contribute to the observed pattern of devaluation. Others argue that the penalty for category-spanning stems from the fact that those who do not focus their efforts narrowly tend to offer products that are of lower quality. Because these two mechanisms often co-occur, it has been difficult to provide definitive evidence of the perceptually driven component of the multiple-category penalty. We employ a natural experiment on a peer-to-peer crowd-funding website to address this gap. Difference-in-difference analyses on matched samples show that category spanning is perceived negatively and can result in devaluation, even in the absence of underlying quality differences. This result supports the argument that perceptual issues contribute to the penalty for category spanning.