(A) trick to overcome tricky audience

Abstract

In this thesis, I examine a new explanation for what determines the market success of collaboration. Focusing on output-level, I argue that the collaborative outputs best managing the tension between the benefits and costs of similarity compared to the focal producer’s previous output will outperform in the market. Drawing upon management, sociology, psychology, and consumer choice literatures, I suggest that when market audience faces the collaborative products, its two opposing expectations and preferences (i.e., similarity and novelty) countervail to predict the success. Using data from Billboard’s Hot 100 charts and music streaming platform, I constructed a novel dataset containing each song’s comparable features and its chart performance to empirically test my argument. I find that the collaborative products that maintain its feature-based optimal similarity compared to the focal producer’s previous output achieve better performance by dealing with countervailing forces in the best manner. To reinforce my argument, I conduct the falsification test by estimating the same model with the sample only containing single song. The results reveal that suggested mechanism is a unique property of collaboration setting. These findings shed a new light to collaboration strategy such as new product development alliance and its partner selection, explaining the market success of output introduced via collaboration and alliance and identifying the effects of dynamic relationship between tension and the producer’s ability to manage it on the performance. The scholarly and managerial implications are discussed.