Conceptual spaces and the consequences of category spanning

Kovács, B.; Hannan, M.T.

doi:10.15195/v2.a13

Conceptual spaces and the consequences of category spanning

Kovács, B.; Hannan, M.T.

Authors

B. Kovács

M.T. Hannan

Abstract

A general finding in economic and organizational sociology shows that objects that span categories lose appeal to audiences. This paper argues that the negative consequences of crossing boundaries are more severe when the categories spanned are distant and have high contrast. Available empirical strategies do not incorporate information on the distances among categories. Here we introduce novel measures of distance in conceptual space and derive measures for typicality, category contrast, and categorical niche width. Using the proposed measurement approach, we test our theory using data on online reviews of books and restaurants.

Citation

Kovács, B., & Hannan, M. (2015). Conceptual spaces and the consequences of category spanning. Sociological Science, 2, 252-286. https://doi.org/10.15195/v2.a13

Journal Article Type	Article
Acceptance Date	Sep 24, 2014
Online Publication Date	May 13, 2015
Publication Date	May 13, 2015
Deposit Date	Jul 20, 2015
Publicly Available Date	Jul 29, 2015
Journal	Sociological Science
Print ISSN	2330-6696
Publisher	Society for Sociological Science
Peer Reviewed	Peer Reviewed
Volume	2
Pages	252-286
DOI	https://doi.org/10.15195/v2.a13
Keywords	Category spanning, Similarity, Conceptual space, Online ratings, Restaurants, Books.
Public URL	https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/output/1402219

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http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Copyright Statement
© 2015 The Author(s). This open-access article has been published under a Creative Commons Attribution License, which allows unrestricted use, distribution and reproduction, in any form, as long as the original author and source have been credited.