Partner search processes and prior exchange experiences constitute important organizational learning processes that provide firms with valuable partner information, which may enhance their ability to design control structures for new interfirm transactions. By increasing trust and by providing first-hand partner information, prior experiences may, however, also reduce the need for control and for new information during the search process. An analysis of 287 transactions between buyers and suppliers of information technology supports that partner search and experience facilitate learning and subsequent control design, but that partner experience simultaneously reduces the need for control and the intensity of the partner search process. Our findings thus indicate that partner experience can have opposite and offsetting effects on control design, which contributes to the discussion on whether prior exchange experiences complement or substitute formal control.

This paper presents a process study on the evolution of new ventures. We adopt the theoretical lens of “archetypes,” which allows us to take a holistic perspective on new venture evolution and to provide rich insights into the interdependencies between the multiple contributory factors that shape the evolutionary process. Our analysis identifies three distinct “venture archetypes,” which typically emphasize one focal area of a business, and it sheds light on the sequencing of these archetypes. We show how the case ventures go through interarchetype transitions, which are triggered by collective cognitive dissonance between the venture leaders' understanding of the old interpretive scheme and the emerging reality and are resolved through internal negotiations. The research provides insights into new venture evolution, the theory of organizational archetypes, and punctuated equilibrium perspectives on organizational change.

This paper develops a framework for estimating multidimensional fit. In the context of contingency thinking and the resource-based view of the firm, there is a clear need for quantitative approaches that integrate fit-as-deviation, fit-as-moderation, and fit-as-system perspectives, implying that the impact on organizational performance of series of bivariate (mis)fits and bundles of multiple (mis)fits are estimated in an integrated fashion. Our approach offers opportunities to do precisely this. Moreover, we suggest summary statistics that can be applied to test for the (non)significance of fit linkages at both the disaggregated level of individual bivariate interactions, as well as the aggregated level of groups of multivariate interactions. We systematically compare our approach with extant alternatives using simulations, including the fit-as-mediation alternative. We find that our approach outperforms these established alternatives by including fit-as-moderation and fit-as-deviation as special cases, by being better able to capture the nature of the underlying fit structure in the data and by being relatively robust to mismeasurements, small sample sizes, and collinearity. We conclude by discussing our method's advantages and disadvantages.

In this paper we report the results of two experimental studies designed to test how demographic characteristics affect outsiders' assessments of a firm's top managers. We draw on theories of evaluation and status characteristics to examine the interactive effects of managers' racial characteristics and educational prestige on external perceptions. In the first study, we find that top executives' educational background and race affected analysts' valuation of a firm's stock. Outside analysts made the highest stock price projections for firms led by white executives who had highly prestigious educational backgrounds but made the lowest valuations for firms led by African Americans with the same prestigious education. We posit that the moderating effect of executives' racial characteristics stems from outsiders' assumptions that African American managers received preferential treatment in the admissions process for high prestige universities. In the second study, we find that when we explicitly removed the possibility of preferential selection, analysts gave the same stock valuation to firms led by white and African American executives with high educational prestige. We discuss the implications of these findings for theory and management.