Knowledge that Transforms

The concept of risk is central to strategy research and practice. Yet, the expected positive association between risk and return, familiar from financial markets, is elusive. Measuring risk as the variance of a series of accounting‐based returns, Bowman obtained the puzzling result of a negative association between risk and mean return. This finding, known as the Bowman paradox, has spawned a remarkable number of publications, and various explanations have been suggested. The present study contributes to this literature by showing that skewness of individual firm' return distributions has a considerable spurious effect on the empirically estimated mean‐variance relationship. I devise a method to disentangle true and spurious effects, illustrate it using simulations, and apply it to empirical data. It turns out that the size of the spurious effect is such that, on average, it explains the larger part of the observed negative relationship. My results might thus help to reconcile mean‐variance approaches to risk‐return analysis with other, ex‐ante, approaches. In concluding, I show that the analysis of skewness is linked to all three streams of literature devoted to explaining the Bowman paradox.

In his thoughtful commentary on our 2005 paper (Gavetti, Levinthal, and Rivkin, 2005), Farjoun offers three critiques and extensions. First, he suggests our approach should have explicitly considered a constructionist logic. Second, Farjoun argues that we have neglected the full array of modes of cognition between rational choice and feedback‐based adaptive learning and have therefore overstated the role of our focal mode, reasoning by analogy. Third, he highlights some of the contingencies under which the various modes of cognition he identifies are effective. In response, we address each point. We first argue that a constructionist perspective is not alien either to the role of analogical reasoning or to the particular modeling apparatus we have developed. We then suggest that despite the richness of modes of cognition that lie between rational choice and adaptive learning, theorizing about them requires simplification and the identification of underlying categories that classify such modes, which is the approach our paper employs. Finally, we clarify how our paper adopts the contingent logic advocated by Farjoun.

A case study of the response to chronic excess capacity in a small competitive industry (the manufacturing of clay bricks) permits a generalization of Bower's concentration hypothesis. Barriers to exit produced a free rider problem where only smaller and lower quality brick plants were shut when the efficient solution demanded major closures. The exit logjam was resolved by the strategic actions of growth‐maximizing managers. They used major acquisitions as the basis for substantial reductions in firm and industry capacity while growing their own market share. The fall in industry capacity enabled other firms to follow suit while maintaining their market share as predicted by prospect theory.

This paper proposes a dynamic framework of economic organization called the option‐creating institution (OCI) model. The claim is made that firm, market, and hybrid governance structures emerge from the need for flexibility in an uncertain world. Each governance structure uniquely provides strategic real options that allow capitalist‐entrepreneurs, with unique risk preferences, to better organize their economic activities. The real options perspective on economic organization is developed by drawing insights from the exchange and coordination perspectives. It is proposed that this real options perspective matches practicing decision makers' intuition and that an inductive OCI model will offer a prescriptive guide.

This commentary responds to and builds upon a recent article about the role of analogical reasoning in strategy making (Gavetti, Levinthal, and Rivkin, 2005). Based on conceptual and formal analysis, the authors state that in complex and novel contexts, analogical reasoning may be superior to two established models: rational choice and local incremental search. I show that given an alternative conceptualization of the strategy‐making context and main models, analogical reasoning is not necessarily superior. Furthermore, in novel and complex contexts, this model and other approaches such as mental experimentation can play a larger role, particularly in inventing effective strategies. I further extend the analysis by considering some boundary conditions in which analogical reasoning and its alternatives best apply, exploring the idea that blending and adapting several search strategies may be more effective than using only one method, such as analogical reasoning, and advancing new directions for empirical research.

An inverted U‐shaped relationship is thought to exist between the number of firms entrenched in a market and the rate of new entrants. This study examined early and late entry by foreign and U.S. banks into the California market following a deregulation in the banking industry in the early 1980s. The study was designed to elucidate the competitive interactions between foreign and domestic banks. Specifically, what response did the entry of foreign banks elicit from domestic banks and what influence did the entry of domestic banks exert on the evolution of the foreign banks in the market. Data covering the period from 1979 to 1988 demonstrate that the density of foreign banks operating in the market had a U‐shaped relationship with the rate of entry of U.S. banks, supporting the argument that foreign investment can encourage the expansion of domestic banks. Although foreign banks were not an obstacle to domestic bank entries, the presence of domestic banks deterred the entry of foreign banks.

We examine firms' choice of organizational governance form. Using longitudinal data on a sample of business format franchisors operating in North America, we show that the cross‐sectional evidence commonly used to demonstrate support for efficient contracting explanations for organizational governance form is not robust to the year of investigation, firm effects, or selection effects. We theorize that this outcome may result from dynamic processes through which a firm's organizational governance form evolves. We develop and test two hypotheses for the effects of organizational momentum on organizational governance form, and find that organizational momentum is a robust predictor. Our results suggest that researchers consider the dynamics of momentum in explaining the form of firm governance.

In this study, we examine how intercommunity relationships affect the growth of organizational communities. Using a unique panel dataset on 53 technology development communities in China spanning 1988–2000, we found that regional community density, a community's geographic proximity to the nearest community and its domain overlap with the nearest community have an inverted U‐shaped relationship with the community's growth. These non‐monotonic results suggest that adjacent communities have both mutualistic and competitive effects on each other. Theoretical and managerial implications are discussed.

Unlike institutional or macro‐cultural explanations of competition, competition need not be viewed as a shared social reality. Instead, competition can be interpreted differently by multiple stakeholders of a value chain. However, due to managerial blind spots, such various interpretations of competition are less than apparent to management. Yet explanations of such blind spots are not well documented. Hence, to explain such blind spots, a conceptual model based on overconfidence biases is developed in which managers develop a ‘self‐centered’ view of competition that blinds them from the competitive beliefs of their value chain customers. Differences in competitive beliefs, thus, arise and are argued to contribute to such managerial blind spots. Furthermore, to empirically examine such managerial blind spots, the competitive perceptions held by various members of a swine genetics value chain were surveyed. Through cluster and MANOVA analyses, this study shows that, unlike institutional/macro‐cultural explanations of competition, these members do not share a common consensus of the key attributes and groupings of competition. The implications and contributions of this study are also discussed.

Existing research on managerial compensation is based primarily on optimal contracting and managerial hegemony theories. Under the optimal contracting theory, observed compensation contracts are optimally determined, aligning the interests of managers and shareholders. Under the managerial hegemony theory, observed compensation contracts deviate from the optimum because top managers with power over boards are able to influence their own pay. I argue that the impact of managerial power over boards on managerial pay, and hence the deviation of compensation contracts from the optimum, is contingent on the transparency of managerial compensation. Within this framework, I investigate the impact of supplemental executive retirement plans (SERPs)— historically the least transparent compensation component— on opportunistic decision making. An empirical analysis based on a time series sample of CEOs of S&P/TSX60 firms provides support of the compensation transparency theory. I find that SERP benefits are primarily driven by variables proxying for CEO power over the board, whereas more transparent compensation components are primarily driven by economic factors. The results also suggest that CEOs whose SERPs are contingent on firm performance appear to reduce firm R&D expenditures as they approach retirement. Both findings provide important contributions to existing research on the impact of managerial compensation on opportunistic decisions.