SPEAKER: Qinyu (Ryan) Wang；Hong Kong Polytechnic University

TIME/DATE: 2025.1.7  10:00

CLASSROOM: A308

ABSTRACT

Corporate scandals often create moral struggles for ecosystem stakeholders who collaborate with scandal-tainted firms on mutually beneficial projects. We examine how these stakeholders navigate their relationships with such firms. Drawing on cognitive dissonance theory, we posit that stakeholders typically withdraw from such collaborations after a scandal. However, if stakeholders continue their engagement, they tend to emphasize the importance of collaborative projects and counterintuitively increase their project contribution. Stakeholders’ responses depend on their choice space for comparable projects and their social embeddedness in the focal projects. By examining the Facebook–Cambridge Analytica scandal and the contribution of open-source software (OSS) developers to Facebook projects with a difference-in-differences approach, we find supporting evidence for our hypotheses. Our study contributes to the stakeholder management literature with practical implications.

GUEST BIO

Dr. Qinyu (Ryan) WANG is an Assistant Professor at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. His research broadly examines economic, social, and psychological mechanisms in the process of innovation, with a particular focus on IP management, open innovation, and business model innovation. His work has been published in leading strategy and innovation journals including Strategic Management Journal and Research Policy.