Managing the Evolutionof Cooperation

Management scholars have long stressed the importance of evolutionary processsesfor inter-firm cooperation but have mostly missed the promising opportunityto incorporate ideas from evolutionary theories into the analysis of collaborativearrangements. In this paper, we first present three rules for the evolution of cooperation– kinship selection, direct reciprocity, and indirect reciprocity. Second, weapply our theoretical considerations, enriched with ideas from cultural anthropology,to the context of a specific and particularly attractive type of cooperative arrangement,the franchise form of organization. Third, we provide a preliminaryempirical test with regards to conditions under which evolutionary modes can securecooperative behavior. We conclude by summarizing our results and derivingfertile areas for further research...