About

Ezra W. Zuckerman Sivan is the Alvin J. Siteman (1948) Professor of Strategy and Entrepreneurship at MIT Sloan. He is also cofounder of MIT Sloan's PhD Program in Economic Sociology. His research focuses on demonstrating how fundamental social processes are important for understanding key issues in business and management, as well as how the dynamics of business and management inform social processes. He is known for his work on the importance of categorical structures in shaping valuation across various markets. Zuckerman Sivan's teaching at the master's and executive levels centers on competitive and technology strategy, and he teaches doctoral courses such as 'Sociology of Strategy' and 'Identity and Action.' He holds a BA in political science from Columbia University, and an MA and PhD in sociology from the University of Chicago.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Management
• Law and economics
• Economics
• Law
• Sociology
• Business
• Psychology
• Microeconomics
• Marketing
• Social psychology
• Epistemology
• Engineering

Selected publications

• How Does Culture Matter for Attainment, and How Would We Know If It Did?

  American Sociological Review · 2025-07-05 · 1 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  In their 2022 ASR article, Horwitz, Matheny, Laryea, and Schnabel (HMLS 2022) argue that religious subculture significantly shapes educational stratification, emphasizing how Jewish subcultures, especially for young women, foster an education-enhancing “habitus and self-concept.” While commending their aim to identify “clear explanatory mechanisms” and avoid essentialist explanations, this Comment critiques HMLS’s methodology and conclusions, addressing the broader question: Can parental cultural socialization explain group-level differences in educational attainment? We identify four issues: mismeasurement of Jewish parentage, insufficient controls for social class, and two gaps in specifying and operationalizing cultural mechanisms. Re-analyzing the National Survey of Youth and Religion (NSYR), we show that HMLS’s findings remain stable after correcting Jewish parentage mismeasurement but shift substantially when better adjusting for social class. We argue that cultural explanations must meet two additional principles—portability and convertibility—to avoid lapsing into essentialism or reproducing “culture of poverty” narratives. These principles require that (a) social and cultural mechanisms function independently of group membership and be transferable across actors and fields, and (b) structural advantages and barriers are acknowledged and integrated. This Comment thus extends existing guidelines for analyzing the role of culture in stratification and offers a framework for identifying non-essentialist mechanisms driving group differences in attainment.

  PublisherDOI

• Your Ancestors Worked Hard for this Legitimacy! Theory and Experiment on the Inauthenticity of Second Movers

  Organization Science · 2024 · 4 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Business
  • Marketing

  Why do first movers into a new industry sometimes gain an advantage simply because of the fact that they are perceived by audiences to be more authentic than second movers, whereas in other contexts such second movers are perceived as no less authentic than first movers? We theorize that this difference hinges on the amount of costly, risky “legitimation work” that entrants are perceived to have conducted in their efforts to establish that the new organizational form is reliable and acceptable. Whereas a first mover must expend great effort to reassure skeptical audiences that the new form coheres with their norms and that it can meet and even exceed their standards, later arrivals are often able to appropriate such legitimacy once it has been established. But such appropriation by the second mover makes its (often implicit) claim of original insight or vision seem less authentic than that of the first mover. In three complementary online experiments on audience reactions to online healthcare startups, we find support for our prediction that followers suffer from a lower consumer preference because they are perceived to have done less work in establishing the new form’s legitimacy. Our results show that when follower firms show evidence of participation in legitimation work, it may overturn the default interpretation and reduce the authenticity discount. Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2022.17215 .

  PublisherDOI

• When Truth Trumps Facts: Studies on Partisan Moral Flexibility in American Politics

  American Journal of Sociology · 2024 · 7 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Sociology
  • Political Science

  This article presents results from a series of online surveys—conducted among American voters during and after the Trump administration—that show how voters from both parties provide explicit moral justification for politicians’ statements that flagrantly violate the norm of fact-grounding. Such justification is inconsistent with prevailing theory, whereby partisan voters’ tendency to mistake misinformation for fact is what drives their positive response to misinformation purveyed by partisan standard-bearers. The studies presented here provide consistent evidence of such factual flexibility. Yet they also provide consistent evidence of moral flexibility, whereby voters justify demagogic fact-flouting as an effective way of proclaiming a deeply resonant political “truth.” A key implication is that political misinformation cannot be fully eliminated by getting voters to distinguish fact from fiction; voters’ moral orientations may be such that they prefer fact-flouting. More general lessons pertain to the role of democratic norms in liberal democracies and to how moral orientations relate to perceived interests.

  PublisherDOI

• When Truth Trumps Facts: Studies on Partisan Moral Flexibility in American Politics

  2023-10-27

  preprintOpen accessSenior author

  This paper presents results from a series of online surveys—conducted among American voters during and after the (President Donald) Trump administration—that show how voters (both Republican and Democratic) provide explicit moral justification for politicians’ statements that flagrantly violate the norm of fact-grounding. Such justification is inconsistent with prevailing theory, whereby partisan voters’ tendency (due either to laziness or bias) to mistake misinformation for fact is the only factor responsible for their positive response to misinformation purveyed by partisan standard bearers. The studies presented in this paper provide consistent evidence of such factual flexibility. Yet they also provide consistent evidence of moral flexibility, whereby voters justify demagogic fact-flouting as an effective way of proclaiming a deeply resonant political “truth.” A key implication is that political misinformation cannot be fully eliminated by getting voters to distinguish fact from fiction; voters’ moral orientations may be such that they prefer fact-flouting. More general lessons pertain to the role of democratic norms in liberal democracies and to how moral orientations relate to perceived interests.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Social Avalanche: Crowds, Cities and Financial Markets

  Contemporary Sociology A Journal of Reviews · 2023-05-01

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• It's About Showing Good Faith, Not Avoiding Shows of Weakness: Reworking Leifer's “Local Action” to Build a Robust Theory of Reciprocity

  Advances in group processes · 2023-11-28 · 1 citations

  book-chapterSenior author

  Abstract Purpose The purpose of this theoretical chapter is to rework a promising but limited theory of the foundations of reciprocity. Reciprocity is often attributed to an “internalized norm of reciprocity” – a deeply felt moral obligation to help those who have helped us in the past. Leifer's theory of local action develops a radically different and compelling foundation for reciprocity – one in which the impetus for reciprocity is a thinly veiled battle for status. We rework the theory to offer a new one that addresses its limitations. The key idea is that the impetus for reciprocity is the desire to signal that one intends to create joint value rather than to capture it from the counterparty. Approach Our analytical approach rests on close examination of a puzzling and underrecognized feature of social exchange: people who initiate social exchange routinely deny giving anything of value (“it was nothing”) while the receiver inflates their indebtedness to the giver (“this is too much!”). We refer to this negotiation strategy as reverse bargaining and use it as a window into the logic of social exchange. Contribution We develop a more general theory of how people manage the threat of opportunism in social exchange that subsumes local action theory. The key insight is that people who initiate social exchange and seek reciprocity must balance two competing objectives: to ensure that the person receiving a benefit recognizes a debt she must repay; and to mitigate the receiver's suspicion that the giver's ulterior motive is to capture value from the receiver.

  PublisherDOI

• Caravan of Gullibility and Grievance

  2020

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Political Science
  Publisher

• Death of the Salesman but Not the Sales Force: How Interested Promotion Skews Scientific Valuation

  American Journal of Sociology · 2019-11-01 · 12 citations

  articleSenior author

  Whereas research has demonstrated how social cues appearing as disinterested social validation can skew valuation processes, interested promotion may be at least as important. This factor is examined here via the premature death of 720 elite life scientists. Especially when scientists are young and their articles have received little attention, their deaths stimulate a long-lasting, positive increase in citation rates, relative to trajectories for equivalent articles authored by counterfactual (i.e., still-living) scientists. These patterns seem largely explained by a spike in posthumous recognition efforts by the deceased scientists’ associates. The upshot is clear evidence of informational inefficiency, which derives from the challenges of absorbing the massive volume of research produced by the scientific community and from its ambivalence about the norm of disinterestedness.

  PublisherDOI

• The Authentic Appeal of the Lying Demagogue: Proclaiming the Deeper Truth about Political Illegitimacy

  American Sociological Review · 2018-01-10 · 306 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  We develop and test a theory to address a puzzling pattern that has been discussed widely since the 2016 U.S. presidential election and reproduced here in a post-election survey: how can a constituency of voters find a candidate “authentically appealing” (i.e., view him positively as authentic) even though he is a “lying demagogue” (someone who deliberately tells lies and appeals to non-normative private prejudices)? Key to the theory are two points: (1) “common-knowledge” lies may be understood as flagrant violations of the norm of truth-telling; and (2) when a political system is suffering from a “crisis of legitimacy” (Lipset 1959) with respect to at least one political constituency, members of that constituency will be motivated to see a flagrant violator of established norms as an authentic champion of its interests. Two online vignette experiments on a simulated college election support our theory. These results demonstrate that mere partisanship is insufficient to explain sharp differences in how lying demagoguery is perceived, and that several oft-discussed factors—information access, culture, language, and gender—are not necessary for explaining such differences. Rather, for the lying demagogue to have authentic appeal, it is sufficient that one side of a social divide regards the political system as flawed or illegitimate.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Death of the Salesman, But Not the Sales Force: How Interested Promotion Skews Scientific Valuation

  National Bureau of Economic Research · 2018-05-01 · 3 citations

  reportSenior author

  Whereas research has demonstrated how social cues appearing as disinterested social validation can skew valuation processes, interested promotion may be at least as important.This factor is examined here via the premature death of 720 elite life scientists.Especially when scientists are young and their articles have received little attention, their deaths stimulate a long-lasting, positive increase in citation rates, relative to trajectories for equivalent articles authored by counterfactual (i.e., still-living) scientists.These patterns seem largely explained by a spike in posthumous recognition efforts by the deceased scientists' associates.The upshot is clear evidence of informational inefficiency, which derives from the challenges of absorbing the massive volume of research produced by the scientific community and from its ambivalence about the norm of disinterestedness.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Oliver Hahl

  11 shared

• Minjae Kim

  7 shared

• Ethan Poskanzer

  University of Colorado System

  7 shared

• Elena Obukhova

  McGill University

  2 shared

• Minjae Kim

  Seoul National University

  2 shared

• Minjae Kim

  2 shared

• Jaekyung Ha

  École de management de Lyon

  1 shared

• Catherine J. Turco

  Research Square (United States)

  1 shared

Awards & honors

• 2019 Cooley-Mead Prize for best article, American Sociologic…