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 misdirect 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. We discuss the implications of this “misfit bias” for producers and their recombinations.
