Does the Middle Conform or Compete? Risk and Audience Response As a Scope for Mid-Status Conformity

The middle-status conformity argument contends that actors in the middle of a status hierarchy fear falling below the standards of their audience and hence conform to prevailing norms. On the other hand, economic intuition would suggest that the middle of the pack experiences the fiercest competition and the strongest pressures to innovate and explore ways to escape the churn. This paper explores the tension between these two ideas, and proposes a general framework for understanding competition in hierarchies that embeds both predictions. Actors face an audience with standards that may be variously responsive to the actors’ choices. At the same time, actors must choose whether to take actions that expose them to favorable or unfavorable risks. Specific combinations of these general conditions can generate arbitrary patterns of exploration and conformity throughout a hierarchy, including both the inverse-U shape prediction of middle-status conformity as well as its opposite. A model formalizes these results and illustrates them in simulation.