This distinction is awarded to roughly the top 10% of accepted papers. As a result, a 6-page abridged version of her paper will be published in the AOM 2026 Proceedings.

In her paper, Dupin, a researcher with the Entrepreneurship & Innovation section, examines what happens when firms benefit from being associated with a market category without fully meeting its criteria, a concept called ‘categorical freeriding’. Earlier research has shown that such freeriding exists but has paid less attention to when and how it gets exposed, and how this has implications for firm competition.

Dupin’s key finding is that spatial proximity plays a crucial role in revealing categorical freeriding. When a freeriding firm is located close to a firm from a related but different category, stakeholders can directly compare the two. This leads them to re-evaluate the freerider and to recognize that it is not a genuine member of the category it claims, resulting in an ‘evaluation discount’ and a higher rate of financial failure.

The study combines secondary data with two experiments in the context of the French bread market, providing robust evidence for the mechanisms through which categorical freeriding is unmasked.