Pengfei Wang obtained his PhD in Strategy from Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University Rotterdam. He was a visiting scholar at Ross School of Business at University of Michigan. His research covers social status, market categories, technological innovation, and venture capital financing. His studies have been accepted for publication by journals including Academy of Management Journal, Strategic Management Journal, Management Science, Research Policy, Journal of Business Venturing, Strategic Organization, Industrial and Corporate Change, among others.
Publications
Wang, Pengfei (2025)
Repositioning, audience churn, and identity ambiguity: The external costs of market repositioning
Strategic Management Journal, 46(6), s. 1363- 1391. Doi: 10.1002/smj.3698
Prior literature has long underscored the importance for market actors to establish clear identities. Extant studies mostly adopt a static view, assessing whether actors adhere to a specific prototype or membership. By stressing a dynamic perspective, we maintain that identities are in flux as actors constantly shift positions. Specifically, we emphasize that repositioning can induce identity ambiguity, undermining the accuracy of audience evaluation. Analyzing market repositioning of US firms, we find that firms with greater repositioning tend to experience a higher degree of churn in their coverage audiences (financial analysts). More importantly, audiences are found to be less accurate in evaluating firms that undertake greater repositioning. These results align with our conjecture about external repositioning costs: Firms risk incurring identity ambiguity when shifting market positions.
Wang, Pengfei & Shi, Yanlin (2025)
Shoot the moving target: A dynamic perspective on optimal distinctiveness and strategic repositioning
How efficacious is the strategy of pursuing optimal distinctiveness (OD)? Scholars have long strived to identify the optimal positions for firms in the market and advocate them to realign themselves accordingly. While plausible, however, prior literature overlooks the process of repositioning towards OD and the dynamic nature of market landscape. Specifically, if all firms reposition simultaneously, current optimal positions could become inferior, such that firms that deliberately move towards OD (OD firms) may get backfired. Emphasizing the dynamics, we utilize a parsimonious agent-based simulation to explore the efficacy of repositioning towards OD. The results indicate that across different scenarios, a significant proportion of OD firms end up experiencing repositioning failure and fail to improve their performance. More importantly, we underscore that the efficacy of repositioning towards OD depends largely on market conditions. It is particularly undermined in markets with more competitors seeking distinctiveness and/or fewer competitors aiming for conformity (e.g., markets with greater leniency). Experimenting with different approaches firms can take to pursue OD, we also find that exploratory repositioning performs better than exploitative repositioning. Finally, our extensional analyses offer further insights by integrating repositioning costs, sequential repositioning, alternative optimal locations, and random explorers.
Wang, Pengfei (2024)
Employee Status, Role Expectation and Performance Evaluation: Evidence from NBA Players
This paper shifts attention from how employee status affects work performance to the role of status in performance evaluation when rewards or penalties for performance are determined. While prior studies have shown that high status enables employees to perform well, we emphasize that it may also elevate role expectations, which then become hard to meet. Building on expectation confirmation theory, we argue especially that high-status employees may be less rewarded for their performance because high expectations of them have been established. Although low-status employees are less likely to perform well, they receive greater rewards on attaining success, suggesting a potential advantage to being disadvantaged ex ante. Moreover, while prior literature highlights various benefits of having prestigious peers, we maintain that the presence of high-status teammates also raises expectations of teamwork. As such, employees will be less rewarded for team performance when they work with high-status teammates. We test our hypotheses in a sample of NBA players and find general support. Our findings highlight employees’ status as a potential liability in performance evaluation.
Wang, Pengfei (2024)
Pricing innovation: The anchoring effect in patent valuation
Prior literature has long recognized the substantial economic value that patents hold in the market. Yet, we know much less about the valuation process, i.e., how market audiences estimate (or determine) the value of newly granted patents. Building on behavioral economics, we propose the anchoring effect as an important cognitive mechanism, such that a patent's valuation is anchored on the value that preceding patents have secured. Analyzing financial valuation of U.S. patents between 1991 and 2010, we find broad support to the anchoring effect. The effect is more pronounced when focal patents are of lower novelty, when prior anchors are more consistent, and when focal firms have a higher patenting frequency. Furthermore, our extensional analysis suggests that anchoring acts as an important driver for the divergence between patents' economic value and scientific quality, which deserves attention from firms and policy makers.
Because high-status employees make disproportional contributions to firms, prior literature suggests that their departure would undermine various organizational outcomes. Building on recent literature, however, we suspect that a high-status employee may have seized disproportional resources and credits from coworkers, thereby restricting them from performing, particularly when the work context is more independent and contested. As a result, the departure of a high-status employee may bring staying coworkers more resources and incentives to perform, causing their performance to improve. To test this possibility, we examine the effect of high-status analysts' departure on the individual performance of analysts who remain, using a sample of sell-side analysts in Chinese financial brokerage firms. Employing a before-and-after treatment research design, we find evidence that after the departure of a high-status analyst, the staying coworkers' individual performance is significantly improved. It is particularly so when they share greater industry overlap with the departing analyst. Our extensional analyses also investigate additional contingencies, which helps provide valuable hints about possible mechanisms.
Wang, Pengfei (2023)
Rebirth from the ashes: Failure events and new venture creation in Norway
How do failure events affect subsequent new venture creation? The existing literature seems to point in two opposing directions. While the information perspective suggests that failure events undermine collective beliefs about market viability, the competition view implies that failures may foster entrepreneurship via easing competition in both factor and product markets. To address this question, we adopt an inductive approach and analyse registry data in Norway. Based on the firm-level microdata, we construct an industry-region-level marketspace to analyse the number of firm failures and new ventures in different markets. Results show that failures of existing firms generally lead to more venture creation in the same market, albeit being contingent on industry features. And such effect is mainly ‘pulled’ by product market vacuum, rather than ‘pushed’ by factor abundance. However, we also observe that ventures that are created following failure events are less likely to survive.
Ubisch, Sverre Søyland & Wang, Pengfei (2023)
Innovation on technological “islands”: domain contrast, boundary spanning, knowledge depth and breadth
Industrial and Corporate Change, 32(5), s. 1023- 1045. Doi: 10.1093/icc/dtad014
Prior literature has long examined innovation as a recombination process within or across the boundaries of technological domains. However, limited attention is paid to boundaries per se. Building upon recent development of categorical contrast, this study distinguishes domains with crisp boundaries from those with fuzzy boundaries and examines their effects on innovation outputs. Analyzing a large sample of US patents, we find that spanning crisp boundaries is more likely to generate impactful inventions but at the same time leads to significantly higher recombinant uncertainty. We continue to explore what types of inventors are better able to span such types of domain boundaries. Focusing specifically on the role of inventors’ knowledge expertise, we find that while both knowledge depth and breadth enhance the impact of technologies that span crisp boundaries, knowledge breadth is also found to escalate the associated uncertainty. Our emphasis on the contrast of technological domains contributes to the literature on recombinative innovation and boundary spanning.
Ubisch, Sverre Søyland & Wang, Pengfei (2022)
Typical Products for Outside Audiences: The Role of Typicality When Products Traverse Countries
While organization theorists have established the importance of typicality, most studies examine situations where producers and audiences dwell within the same category system (e.g., a country, industry, or market). However, much less attention is paid to the role of typicality when products are introduced from one system to another. Since defining what is typical is commonly system-specific, typical products in one category system may be perceived as being atypical in others. It is therefore important to understand how typicality shapes market exchanges when products traverse category systems. To shed light on this, we introduce two key concepts—home typicality and host typicality—and examine specifically how they affect the performance of products distributed across countries. By analyzing a large sample of films, we find that films are more successful in international markets, when they are more typical of their home countries and/or more atypical of their host countries.
Wang, Pengfei (2022)
Looking into the past: Audience heterogeneity and the inconsistency of market signals
This study draws attention to the embedding process of market entrants, by examining the initial and subsequent partnerships of de alio entrants versus de novo entrants. Although de alio entrants have access to superior resources from their parents, they may encounter more resistance from the market as they project impure identity, introduce different logics, and pose greater competitive threats. Analyzing a sample of new entrants in the venture capital market, we find that while de alio entrants are less likely to establish initial partnerships with mainstream incumbents (i.e. receiving an overall initial resistance from the market), they are more likely than de novo entrants to establish ties with high-status incumbents (i.e. gaining more initial endorsement from the core). Results also show that initial network positions allow de alio entrants to sustain gaining prestigious endorsement in the later period, and at the same time to offset the overall resistance from mainstream incumbents. Our findings contribute to the literature on market entry and corporate demography.
Wang, Pengfei (2019)
Price space and product demography: Evidence from the workstation industry, 1980–1996
This study adds to the product innovation literature by emphasizing the important yet understudied role of price distribution in shaping product demography (i.e. new product introductions and exits). While prior research has focused on market niches in the technological and geographic spaces in order to explain product demography, price space has received very limited attention despite the important role of price in the market. We posit that product dynamics are largely shaped by the existing price distribution. More specifically, we argue that local density in price space determines both the likelihood of existing products exiting the market and the rate of new products entering it. Analyzing product exit and entry in the U.S. workstation industry from 1980 to 1996, we find that while price density increases an existing product’s exit rate, new products are also more likely to enter the niches where the price density is high. We also draw attention to internal price density within multiproduct firms, analyzing a product’s price distance from the other products launched by the same firm. We find that this type of internal price density decreases both existing products’ exit rate and new products’ entry likelihood. Our emphasis on price space contributes to the literature on product innovation and demography.
Wang, Pengfei (2018)
Broadening versus reinforcing investor portfolios: Social structure and the search for venture capital investors
Uncertainty experienced by market audiences is the fundamental premise for status to take effect. Whereas prior research usually assumes that uncertainty is evenly distributed among audiences, this study emphasizes the heterogeneity of audiences. Audiences usually differ in the scope of firms they cover. They acquire more information and confront less uncertainty when evaluating firms under their coverage than those not. Status may thus exert different effects across audiences. My theoretical development is situated in the context of M&A. In particular, I hypothesize that although an acquirer's status is generally beneficial, it is more appealing to investors who do not cover the acquirer, as compared to covering investors. Results of the empirical analysis on the U.S. deals between 1990 and 2014 provide considerable support for my framework.
Wang, Pengfei; Van de Vrande, Vareska & Jansen, Justin (2017)
Balancing exploration and exploitation in inventions: Quality of inventions and team composition
