Exploring strategies within the informal economythree essays on illegal online pharmacies

Resumen

The informal economy is often understudied, and as a result we lack a conceptual understanding about how firms compete and strategize in the illegal side of the economy. In this dissertation, I seek to redress this by looking at strategies that illegal online pharmacies and their stakeholders use to help elucidate general management theories, through three empirical essays. In the first essay I look at how audiences respond to the use of multiple impression management efforts, and show that at a certain point adding efforts may be detrimental because suspicion might be triggered. This emphasizes the importance of exploring cogitation when looking at impression management. In the second essay I provide a novel rationale for why some certifications could be detrimental to the firm, by looking at violations of audience expectations. I demonstrate that if audiences believe problems to be salient in a firm, then certifications are seen as a way to showcase that those problems are being addressed, resulting in a positive expectancy violation and improved trust outcomes. If, however, the problem is not seen as salient, then certifications provide information that the problem is more salient than originally expected, giving rise to a negative expectancy violation and worse trust outcomes. In the third essay I build a more nuanced model about who regulators target. I argue that regulators will be less likely to target violators with strong competitive advantages and hard-to-build resources/capabilities, because they are more likely to ignore them given how much they would lose, and are therefore relatively costlier to purse. My dissertation contributes to a number of management theories including impression management, certification, expectancy violations, and regulatory enforcement theories.