We examine how and why elements of organizational design depend on one another. An agent-based simulation allows us to model three design elements and two contextual variables that have rarely been analyzed jointly: a vertical hierarchy that reviews proposals from subordinates, an incentive...

Scholars who view organizational, social, and technological systems as sets of interdependent decisions have increasingly used simulation models from the biological and physical sciences to examine system behavior. These models shed light on an enduring managerial question: How much exploration...

Researchers examining loosely coupled systems, knowledge management, and complementary practices in organizations have proposed, informally, that the complexity of a successful business strategy can deter imitation of the strategy. This paper explores this proposition rigorously. A simple model...

While the course of technological change is widely accepted to be highly uncertain and unpredictable, little work has identified or studied the ultimate sources and causes of that uncertainty. This paper proposes that purely technological uncertainty derives from inventors' search processes with...

This paper contributes large-sample evidence to an emerging discussion on open innovation and firm strategy. We ask why a startup should participate in an open standards community. We propose four ways that participation might increase a startup's chances of a liquidity event: gaining...

Are lone inventors more or less likely to invent breakthroughs? Recent research has attempted to resolve this question by considering the variance of creative outcome distributions. It has implicitly assumed a symmetric thickening or thinning of both tails, i.e., that a greater probability of...

Whereas a number of studies have considered the implications of employee mobility, comparatively little research has considered institutional factors governing the ability of employees to move from one firm to another. This paper explores a legal constraint on mobility--employee non-compete...

Entrepreneurs, even more than employees, tend to locate in regions in which they have deep roots ("home" regions). Here, we examine the performance implications of these choices. Whereas one might expect entrepreneurs to perform better in these regions because of their richer endowments of...

No abstract available.

The broker profits by intermediating between two (or more) parties. Using a biform game, we examine whether such a position can confer a competitive advantage, as well as whether any such advantage could persist if actors formed relations strategically. Our analysis reveals that, if one...