Perils of Calling a Lemon a Lemon: Transference in Communicating Past Experience
By Niro Sivanathan, Nate Pettit, Hemant Kakkar
Academy of Management Proceedings | November 2017
DOI
journals.aom.org/doi/10.5465/ambpp.2016.14168abstract
Citation
Sivanathan, Niro., Pettit, Nate., Kakkar, Hemant. Perils of Calling a Lemon a Lemon: Transference in Communicating Past Experience Academy of Management Proceedings journals.aom.org/doi/10.5465/ambpp.2016.14168abstract.
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Academy of Management Proceedings, 2017
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Abstract
Transactions among strangers are ripe for fraud. To cope, people collect and distribute reputation information, which can foster trust among strangers and deter fraud. This research demonstrates, however, that recipients of reputation information engage in shallow cognitive associations that assign communicators the very traits that they have communicated about others (Study 1). Further, these poor but potent associations contaminate the communicator’s intrinsic traits (Study 2), with downstream economic costs. The data highlight both the unintended negative consequences and the potential for strategic exploitation by those who communicate reputational information.

Hemant Kakkar is an Associate Professor of Organisational Behaviour at the Indian School of Business (ISB). Prior to this, he served as an Assistant and Associate (untenured) Professor of Management and Organisations at the Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business. He received his doctoral degree in Organisational Behaviour from London Business School.
His research draws on social psychology and evolutionary theories of status and influence to examine judgments and behaviours of individuals and groups within social hierarchies. He also examines individuals' tendencies to engage in both positive and negative deviant behaviours.

He was awarded the 2021 Alvah H. Chapman Jr. Outstanding Dissertation Award, as well as, the Outstanding Dissertation Award 2021 by the International Association of Conflict Management. His research has also won Best Conference Paper awards from the Conflict Management Division of the Academy of Management (2021) and the International Association of Conflict Management (2021).

His research is published in leading academic journals, including the Academy of Management Journal, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Journal of Applied Psychology, Nature Human Behaviour, Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, and Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. His research has also been featured in several popular media outlets, such as The Washington Post, Forbes, The Atlantic, Scientific American, The Times UK, and the Harvard Business Review.

At ISB, Professor Kakkar teaches the core course in Organisational Behaviour.  He has also taught Foundations of Organisational Behaviour to postgraduate students and graduate-level seminar courses at the Fuqua School of Business. In 2021, he received the Award for Excellence in Teaching for the MMS program. Before joining academia, he worked as a Technical Consultant at Tata Consultancy Services Ltd., India.

Hemant Kakkar
Hemant Kakkar