Liyue Yan

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: https://doi.org/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