This study integrates insights from stakeholder theory and the literature on competitive dynamics and incumbent responses to entry. While research in economics and strategy has examined how market incumbents respond to new entrants, little is known about the heterogeneity in these responses to the entry of a stakeholder-oriented firm; our study addresses this research gap. Findings from a novel, longitudinal dataset of 206 granularly defined pharmaceutical markets in India suggest that stakeholder-oriented firm entry in these markets is associated with an (...) impact on prices and product differentiation with heterogeneous responses from high-end and low-end incumbents. Specifically, entry by a stakeholder-oriented firm results in a reduction in prices and dosage sizes from high-end incumbents, whereas low-end incumbents respond in the opposite direction. (shrink)

Why do some organizations suffer more than others in the wake of an industry scandal? Although ex-ante greater opportunistic behavior of organizations is one factor, we argue that ex-post greater targeting of organizations is another important factor. Using the context of microfinance organizations (MFOs), we examine why the financial sustainability of for-profit and non-profit organizations may be heterogeneously affected following a scandal. Leveraging the 2010 Indian microfinance scandal as our research setting and analyzing longitudinal data, we find a substantial decline (...) in the financial sustainability of Indian MFOs relative to their counterparts within the rest of South Asia. Compared to Indian non-profit MFOs, Indian for-profit MFOs suffered substantially more. Intriguingly, these results hold not only in the full sample, but also in the matched sample of comparable for-profit and non-profit MFOs. Further analysis reveals that the adverse impact on for-profit MFOs was much bigger in the scandal’s epicenter. Our findings suggest that some organizations may suffer more than others not only due to their engagement in actual malfeasance but also due to their greater targeting by the social control agents. We discuss the implications of this study for social enterprise managers and policymakers. (shrink)

A crucial aspect of the human mind is the ability to project the self along the time line to past and future. It has been argued that such self-projection is essential to re-experience past experiences and predict future events. In-depth analysis of a novel paradigm investigating mental time shows that the speed of this “self-projection” in time depends logarithmically on the temporal-distance between an imagined “location” on the time line that participants were asked to imagine and the location of another (...) imagined event from the time line. This logarithmic pattern suggests that events in human cognition are spatially mapped along an imagery mental time line. We argue that the present time-line data are comparable to the spatial mapping of numbers along the mental number line and that such spatial maps are a fundamental basis for cognition. (shrink)

Immediate experience localizes the self within the limits of the physical body. This spatial unity has been challenged by philosophical and mystical traditions aimed to isolate concepts of mind and body. A more direct challenge of the spatial unity comes from a well-defined group of experiences called 'autoscopic phenomena' , in which the subject has the impression of seeing a second own body in an extrapersonal space. AP are known to occur in many human cultures and have been described in (...) healthy, as well as neurological and psychiatric populations. In this article we investigate the phenomenology of AP as described in the writings of the ecstatic Kabbalah of the thirteenth century, and search for similarities and differences with respect to AP from these and other populations. The article discusses potential common research areas between cognitive science and the science of religious experience. (shrink)