Before shooting star fade out: Positive status shifts and formation of status heterophilous ties

Abstract

We investigate how social actors who become high-status select status of partners. Literature on status homophily explains that high-status actors work with same status ones. By doing so, they can avoid perceptions of low quality of product especially when uncertainty is high. However, literature on status heterophily explains that high-status partners can make a tie with low-status ones when they need to extract efforts from low-status ones. In this paper, we focus on the status heterophilous tie formation by considering when social actors just become high-status. After becoming high-status, they receive extraordinary amount of recognition, so that they want to avoid competing with other high-status actors for their recognition. To do so, we expect that these actors prefer to work with low-status actors. We also consider visibility of their product and brokerage positions of these actors and that can increase the effects of high-status actors on formation of status heterophilous ties. We test these hypotheses by collecting data on Oscar winner directors and nominees as their counterfactuals with difference-in-differences analysis.