The Misfit Bias
研究发现，消费者会因产品组合不匹配而连带贬低其中的单个元素，且这种偏见在强调整体评价时更严重，对创新和创业领域有启示。
Consumers and other audiences often penalize products that combine unrelated elements. In this paper, we document the consequences of that penalty for the evaluation of the elements being combined. Building on the idea that audiences cannot fully disentangle the quality of “fit” between elements from the quality of the elements individually, we argue that audiences are likely to direct their dislike of a misfit product to the individual elements being combined. Using an archival study of the music industry and an online experiment with photographic galleries, we find that evaluations of individual elements (songs, photographs) are influenced by product-level fit (albums, galleries). Elements of misfit products are evaluated less favorably than they would have been otherwise. Moreover, this bias is exacerbated when the evaluation of the whole product is emphasized. We discuss the implications of this “misfit bias” for the innovation, entrepreneurship, and categories literatures. Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2023.17462 .