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| Type | Master's Thesis |
| Scope | Discipline-based scholarship |
| Title | Between Ego and Success: Naming the Company after Yourself as the Ultimate Naming Strategy? |
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| Institution | University of Zurich |
| Faculty | Faculty of Business, Economics and Informatics |
| Number of Pages | 56 |
| Date | 2018 |
| Abstract Text | Based mainly on the paper “Eponymous Entrepreneurs” (Belenzon, Chatterji and Daley 2017a), this work deals with the relationship between naming a company after its respective owner (a process or strategy which is called “eponymy”) and its profitability in emerging markets. Contrary to the findings of the above-mentioned paper, the author of this thesis was not able to identify a positive link between eponymy and a firm’s performance in a dataset of Western European companies. Given a sample of more than 30’000 companies from 24 emerging countries, and after taking several empirical models into account, this work concludes eponymy seems, in general, not to have an influence on a company’s profitability in emerging countries. Under some circumstances, the financial performance may even be significant and negative for companies named after their founders, with -2.7% of Return on Equity. These results may be influenced by the composition of the dataset: 80% of the analyzed companies in the sample originated from just three countries and almost all of these firms are private ones which generally affects the transparency of the available financial information on these organizations. Nevertheless, the signaling model presented in the reference paper, according to which eponymy should signal the superior quality of a company’s products or services to customers by risking the respective owner’s own reputation, may not apply to a highly uncertain environment, such as can be currently found in emerging economies. Informational asymmetries seem to be just too high to overcome, even by a naming strategy that usually should help in being able to do so. |
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