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Employee Profile

Liyue Yan

Assistant Professor - Department of Strategy and Entrepreneurship

Publications

Goldfarb, Brent & Yan, Liyue (2021)

Revisiting Zuckerman's (1999) Categorical Imperative: An Application of Epistemic Maps for Replication

Strategic Management Journal, 42(11), s. 1963- 1992. Doi: 10.1002/smj.3290 - Full text in research archive

We revisit Zuckerman's (1999) “The Categorical Imperative: Securities Analysts and the Illegitimacy Discount,” which theorizes that when organizations are recognized as legitimate players in a category, they perform better. A replication exercise fails to reproduce two of three sets of results. Assisted by data shared by the original author, we find evidence that the inconsistency is due to a coding error in the original and differences between analyst data sets. We illustrate the use of epistemic maps and evaluate the theory's predictive power across a broad set of plausible empirical assumptions and also for a subsequent time period. The results are not robust. We conclude that these data provide little evidence to support strategic recommendations. Challenges and remedies for replication are discussed

Academic Degrees
Year Academic Department Degree
2021 Robert H. Smith School of Business PhD