Research

Alex Tyulyupo and Balázs Kovács

Sociological Science

The typicality premium, the tendency of audiences to favor prototypical category members, can weaken or reverse across contexts. I show that this variation originates in the search process itself. The premium emerges only when searchers invoke industry categories and disappears under keyword search. Among category-based searches, it depends on the fit between the searcher's goal and the invoked category. Typicality effects are a contingent product of how searchers use categories, not a structural property of categories themselves.

Balázs Kovács and Alex Tyulyupo

Industrial and Corporate Change

This paper extends the view of categories as tools of search from industry to geography. Locations qualify as categorical instruments when they carry industrial identities that orient outsiders' expectations about the firms found there. We develop venture-location congruence as a parallel to venture-industry congruence and find that classical atypicality penalties operate at low congruence but reverse at high. Geography functions as a categorical lens in its own right.

Alex Tyulyupo and Balázs Kovács

Journal of Business Venturing

Competition is implicit in many foundational and modern theories of entrepreneurship, yet little is known about how perceptions of competition form and shape venture development. This paper argues that competition is a uniquely uncertain ingredient in the formation of opportunity beliefs. Encountering a competitor triggers a threat assessment, updates broader perceptions of competitive pressure, and can prompt revision of the venture concept. A revised venture may face a different competitive landscape, at which point identification begins again.

Alex Tyulyupo and Balázs Kovács

Strategic Management Journal

Performance depends on searching a landscape whose dimensions are the attributes that actually matter. Organizational learning theory has modeled how actors choose among dimensions but says little about how they construct them. This paper argues that actors construct those dimensions by identifying competitors. Sessions on the simulation platform show that participants facing similar venture concepts in an identical information environment produce widely divergent competitor sets, and much of this divergence corresponds to differences in how they search.

Paul Gouvard, Balázs Kovács, and Alex Tyulyupo

Research in the Sociology of Organizations, special issue on categories in the digital age

This chapter generalizes a pattern my work documents at the level of individual searchers, where category effects disappear the moment searchers stop invoking categories. We argue that digital environments increasingly produce this condition at market scale, decoupling evaluation from categorical membership. If category effects persist where users are unaware of any category, the literature must specify the mechanisms that carry them.

Computational model in development

This project introduces a producer-side mechanism into research on category spanning. Members of a category collectively learn the performance landscape within its boundaries, so a producer that stays inside searches with the benefit of accumulated peer experience, while one that spans beyond must learn the new landscape alone. The model generates the familiar spanning discount with no appeal to audience perceptions and predicts when violating a strong boundary may carry greater long-run upside.