Engagement and Mutual Influence of Multiple Audiences and the Performance of Boundary Spanners

Recent research on market categories revealed that while most audiences penalize producers that span multiple market categories by withdrawal of resources and attention, few audiences react to boundary spanners in more positive ways. It remains unknown, however, whether different audiences affect each other’s judgments and, if they do, what the consequences of this mutual influence for boundary spanners are. We develop a theory explaining how three different types of audiences, namely, investors, consumers and critics, react to an extraordinary past success of a boundary spanning producer. We argue that these three audiences rely on different evaluation criteria to assess the producer’s success. When different audiences disagree in their evaluation of the boundary spanner, they tend to ignore each other’s judgments when deciding how to interact with this producer. However, when different audiences agree that the boundary spanner achieved an extraordinary success, all three different audiences tend to ignore boundary spanning and reward this producer. We find support for our theory in the probit analysis of the population of all co- productions of TV shows created for the primetime on networks in the U.S., 1947- 2003.