We explore the effectiveness of economic experimentation as a learning mechanism through a historical exploration of the early automobile industry. We focus on a particular subset of economic experiments, called strategic pivots, that requires irreversible firm commitments. Our quantitative...

Francis Bacon, pioneer of the scientific method, noted in one of his aphorisms that “human understanding is of its own nature prone to suppose the existence of more order and regularity in the world than it finds.” In this paper, we evaluate the extent to which this tendency encourages...

We challenge the premise that the CEO's job is to keep the corporation alive and thriving at all costs and under all circumstances. We briefly review the differing normative views of strategic management theorists and organizational theorists about organizational inertia. We then develop an...