My theoretical contributions are focused in two domains. One stream endeavors to reveal how perceptual factors regarding category membership affect how market participants make evaluative decisions, sometimes to dramatic effect. My second stream applies this cognitive perspective to theorize novel mechanisms of the labor market matching process. By conceptualizing social categories of job seekers, such as their race, gender, or country of origin, as cognitive constructs, I can apply decision theories to explain hiring outcomes.

Published/Forthcoming

8. Reschke, Brian P. and Ming D. Leung. 2021. "Variety is the Spice of Life: Heterogeneity in Evaluator Engagement and the Valuation of Atypicality," Research in the Sociology of Organizations, Volume 77, 163–186 (Forthcoming).

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Since initial demonstrations that categories are consequential for evaluation, scholars of organizations and markets have attended to dynamics in audience evaluations of category spanning. We consider how heterogeneity in evaluator engagement in a market may alter their evaluation of atypical candidates. In markets where evaluators self-propagate theories of diversification, atypical candidates are advantaged because they present a distinct and efficient opportunity to diversify. We argue that evaluator market engagement will (positively) moderate valuations of atypicality, as such evaluators will be better positioned to recognize atypical candidates and their alignment with prevailing theories of value. We find support for our contentions with data from an online peer-to-peer lending market, Prosper.com. Consistent with our hypothesis, we find that lender evaluation of these atypical borrowers is increasing in their market engagement: whereas lenders new to the market devalue atypical candidates, those who have made many evaluations evaluate atypicality positively.

7. Hurley, Vanessa B., Hector P. Rodriguez, Stephen Kearing, Yue Wang, Ming D. Leung, and Stephen M. Shortell. 2020. "The Impact of Decision Aids on Adults Considering Hip or Knee Surgery." Health Affairs, 39 (1). DOI:10.1377/hlthaff.2019.00100

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Trials of decision aids developed for use in shared decision making find that patients engaged in that process tend to choose more conservative treatment for preference-sensitive conditions. Shared decision making is a collaborative process in which clinicians and patients discuss trade-offs and benefits of specific treatment options in light of patients’ values and preferences. Decision aids are paper, video, or web-based tools intended to help patients match personal preferences with available treatment options. We analyzed data for 2012–15 about patients within the ten High Value Healthcare Collaborative member systems who were exposed to condition-specific decision aids in the context of consultations for hip and knee osteoarthritis, with the intention that the aids be used to support shared decision making. Compared to matched patients not exposed to the decision aids, those exposed had two-and-a-half times the odds of undergoing hip replacement surgery and nearly twice the odds of undergoing knee replacement surgery within six months of the consultation. These findings suggest that health care systems adopting decision aids developed for use in shared decision making, and used in conjunction with hip and knee osteoarthritis consultations, should not expect reduced surgical utilization.

6. Barach, Moshe, Aseem Kaul, Ming D. Leung, and Sibo Lu. 2019. "Small numbers bargaining in the age of big data: Evidence from a two-sided labor matching platform." Strategy Science, 4 (4): 298-322.

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In this study, we examine how firms engage with the big data capabilities of two-sided matching platforms. While such platforms can use artificial intelligence (AI) and big data techniques to help firms find better transaction partners, the effectiveness of these technologies depends on the concentration of transactions undertaken on the platform, giving rise to a potential small numbers bargaining problem, as users become increasingly dependent on the platform to find transaction partners. We argue that firms deal with this appropriation challenge through strategies of partial reliance: they make use of the platform’s AI driven recommendations to identify an initial set of generally acceptable partners, then rely on their own internal capabilities to select the best firm-specific match. We test this argument in the context of an online labor platform, using a regression discontinuity design to causally identify the effect of the platform’s recommendations on the hiring choices of firms at every stage of the recruiting process. Consistent with our theory, we find that firms rely heavily on the platform’s recommendations when screening job applicants to view, but ignore these recommendations when deciding whom to hire from among those interviewed, with the reliance on the platform’s recommendations being weaker for more specialized jobs and for more experienced employers. The study contributes to our understanding of how firms use big data technologies, highlighting the challenges these technologies pose for organizational governance and scope choice, and providing a bridge between research on AI and big data and work on two-sided markets.

5. Leung, Ming D. and Sharon Koppman. 2018. "Taking a Pass: How Proportional Prejudice and the Decision Not to Hire Reproduce Sex Segregation in an Online Labor Market." American Journal of Sociology, 124 (3): 762-813.

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We propose and test a theory of how decisions not to hire reproduce sex segregation through what we term proportional prejudice. We hypothesize that employers are less likely to hire anyone when the applicant pool contains a large proportion of gender atypical applicants – that is, applicants from a different gender than the typical job holder – because they view this as a signal of a poor quality applicant pool. Analyses, of over seven million job applications for over 700,000 jobs by over 200,000 freelancers on an online platform for contract labor support our contention. A survey experiment isolates the mechanism: Applicant pools with a larger proportion of gender atypical applicants were perceived as less likely to contain people who “seemed skilled enough for the job.” We conclude by demonstrating how our theory explains the mixed findings as to whether gender atypical job seekers are disadvantaged in the hiring process.

4. Leung, Ming D. 2018. “Learning to hire? Hiring as a Dynamic Experiential Learning Process in an Online Market for Contract Labor.” Management Science, 64 (12): 5461-5959.

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We know a job applicant’s social category affects an employer’s likelihood of hiring them, but we do not know whether, or how, employers update their beliefs regarding these social categories. I examine how prior negative and positive hiring experiences of employees from particular countries affect an employer’s subsequent likelihood of hiring applicants from those countries. I hypothesize that employer reactions will reflect loss aversion – that employers will react more strongly to negative hiring experiences than positive ones. Furthermore, I expect that the similarity of the prior job will moderate this effect. Analyses of 3.9 million applications, from freelancers worldwide, for over 290,000 jobs on an online labor market demonstrate that employers are 15% less likely (versus 8% more likely) to hire freelancers from a country following a prior negative (versus positive) experience. Prior negative experiences with similar jobs (versus dissimilar jobs) lead employers to be 82% less likely (versus 8% less likely) to hire from that country. Conversely, positive experiences with similar jobs (versus dissimilar jobs) lead employers to be 25% more likely (versus 3% more likely) to subsequently hire from that country. The consequences for switching countries, following negative experiences, are analyzed and wage differences to compensate for employer reactions, are calculated. Contributions to the hiring discrimination, impression formation, and gig-economy literatures are discussed.

3. Leung, Ming D. 2014. “Dilettante or Renaissance Person? How the Order of Job Experiences Affects Hiring in an External Labor Market.” American Sociological Review, 79 (1): 136-158.

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Social actors who move across categories are typically disadvantaged relative to their more focused peers. Yet candidates who compile experiences across disparate areas can either be appreciated as renaissance individuals or penalized as dilettantes. Extant literature has focused on the comparison between single versus multiple category members and on skill assessment, hindering its applicability. To discriminate between more versus less successful category spanners, I suggest that the order of accumulated experiences matters, because it serves as an indicator of commitment. I propose the concept of erraticism and predict that employers will prefer candidates who demonstrate some erraticism, by moving incrementally between similar jobs, over candidates who do not move and also over those with highly erratic job histories. Furthermore, I suggest this relationship holds for more complex jobs, less experienced freelancers, and is attenuated through working together. These issues are particularly salient given the rise of external labor markets where careers are increasingly marked by moves across traditional boundaries. I test and find support for these hypotheses with data from an online crowd-sourced labor market for freelancing services, Elance.com. I discuss how virtual mediated labor markets may alter hiring processes.

2. Leung, Ming D. with Amanda J. Sharkey. 2014. “Out of Sight, Out of Mind? Evidence of Perceptual Factors in the Multiple-category Discount.” Organization Science, 25 (1) p.171-184.

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Extant work shows that market actors who span multiple social categories tend to be devalued relative to their more specialized peers. Scholars typically explain this pattern of results with one of two arguments. Some contend that perceptual factors, namely the difficulties that buyers have in making sense of category spanners, contribute to the observed pattern of devaluation. Others argue that the penalty for category-spanning stems from the fact that those who do not focus their efforts narrowly tend to offer products that are of lower quality. Because these two mechanisms often co-occur, it has been difficult to provide definitive evidence of the perceptually-driven component of the multiple-category penalty. We employ a natural experiment on a peer-to-peer lending website to address this gap. Difference-in-difference analyses on matched samples show that category spanning is perceived negatively and can result in devaluation, even in the absence of underlying quality differences. This result supports the argument that perceptual issues contribute to the penalty for category spanning.

1. Negro, Giacomo and Ming D. Leung. 2013. ""Actual" and Perceptual Effects of Category Spanning." Organization Science, 24(3): 684-696.

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Literature to date has demonstrated that producers and products spanning multiple categories have inferior market performance. However, two related but distinct explanations exist as to the source of such a discount. One explanation suggests that “actual” skills are degraded when producers attempt to engage across diverse categories. Another explanation involves perceptual fit to category representations held by an audience as the cause. These two explanations tend to be confounded in archival studies because external observers, responsible for the evaluation of market performance, are often aware of both the identity of producers and the underlying characteristics of their products. This leaves researchers unable to empirically separate effects. We present an analysis conducted in a setting in which it was possible to distinguish the two mechanisms, critics’ ratings of the same wines through “blind” and “non–blind” tastings. The findings indicate that after controlling for the value of ratings assigned blindly, the wines made by wineries spanning styles continue to receive lower ratings in the non–blind situation.

Under Review

A. Syakhroza, Aulia and Ming D. Leung. 2021. "A Fatherhood Penalty? Examining Fatherhood and Promotion in the Workplace," Revision requested.

Existing scholarship on fatherhood and labor outcomes have put forth the ‘good providers’ perspective, which posits that fathers are more likely to increase involvement in the workplace because of their responsibility as providers. In contrast, the ‘new fatherhood’ perspective convey the idea that fathers need more time for child-rearing and would decrease work effort as a result. Yet, what little empirical evidence we have from both camps sheds little light on how fatherhood would ultimately affect career outcomes. In this paper, we examine whether and how becoming a father affects promotion time within an organization. We believe fathers would need to spend more effort child-rearing compared to non-fathers and as such, fatherhood would be associated with a penalty to a father’s promotion time. We also specify under which contingencies this penalty is strengthen. We find fathers to be more penalized in managerial roles and in jobs with a higher density of advanced degree holders – lending credence to our contention that father’s become less cognitively engaged. We test our hypotheses using historical employment data of 1,822 male employees at a federal-level government organization in Indonesia from 1980-2019.

B. Yang, Tiantian, Jiayi Bao, and Ming D. Leung. 2021. "Approaching or Avoiding: Gender Asymmetry in Reactions to Past Job-Search Experience." Under Review.

This paper presents a novel investigation into how supply-side job seeking interacts with demand-side hiring decisions to reproduce occupational gender segregation. The authors theorize that because female job seekers are less confident of their ability in male-typed jobs than their male counterparts, they will be more responsive to cues from employers. Specifically, job application success will encourage female job seekers to approach similar work in the future; employers’ rejections, on the other hand, will be particularly discouraging, leading women to avoid similar work in the future. Analyses of a longitudinal dataset of three million applications for IT and programming jobs from an online freelancing platform support the theory. Past job-seeking experience, either positive or negative, exerted a stronger effect on how women, compared to men, approached or avoided applying to IT and programming. Because failure is the more prevalent outcome, female freelancers stop applying to male-typed jobs quicker than males. In contrast, analyses in the female-typed writing and translation field did not reveal similar gender patterns. Gender asymmetries in response to employers’ hiring decisions reproduce occupational gender segregation by reducing women’s representation in male-typed but not female-typed fields. Implications for research on gender segregation, careers and hiring are discussed.

C. Koppman, Sharon, Ming D. Leung, and Tingting Nian. 2021. “Moving Up by Moving Around? The Impact of Career Distinctiveness on Organizational Advancement and Inequality” Under Review

In the age of restructuring and flattening, many private-sector managerial organizations have started to dismantle formal job ladders. Yet scholarly theories of careers in organizations have not kept up with this shift. We advance a new perspective that can better account for the more varied career trajectories that emerge in contemporary organizations. We argue that careers along “roads less traveled” in organizations, penalized in other contexts, are rewarded here. More specifically, employees reap benefits from careers composed of moves between jobs that are rarely spanned by other firm employees—what we term career distinctiveness—because these moves grant access to career-enhancing opportunities that cut across an organization’s bureaucratic and social structures. Given that access to these career-enhancing opportunities tends to be more limited for women and racial minorities, we also expect career distinctiveness is particularly beneficial for them. We test these arguments using over three million employee-month observations for over 53,000 employees at a high-tech Fortune 500 firm from 2008 through 2015. Our results support our arguments. This study updates the literature on organizational careers, delineates a context in which spanning professional boundaries can be advantageous, and has practical implications for organizations seeking to reduce gender and racial pay gaps.

Working Papers

Daviss, Claire and Ming D. Leung. 2021. “Gender, An Uphill Battle: Employer Learning, and the Persistence of Occupational Gender Segregation.”

Leung, Ming D., Ben Lourie, Chuchu Liang, and Chenqi Zhu. 2021. “Heterogeneous Effects of External Audience Perceptions of a Firm’s Environment Social and Governance Efforts On Employee Turnover.”

Leung, Ming D. 2021. “Hiring as a cognitive decision: How job-experience variety of an applicant pool affects employers’ failed job searches."

Yang, Tiantian, Jiayi Bao, and Ming D. Leung. 2021. “African American Job Seeking and Self Presentation.”