Knowledge-intensive business services (KIBS) have been posited to play a critical role as innovation agent and knowledge broker in the new economy. While a substantial part of the literature on KIBS stresses their function as an innovation agent to their clients’ innovation process and their...

Organizations learn and adapt their aspiration levels based on reference points (prior aspiration, prior performance, and prior performance of reference groups). The relative attention that organizations allocate to these reference points impacts organizational search and strategic decisions....

Behavioral Theory highlights the crucial role of social comparisons in attention allocation in adaptive aspirations. Yet, both the specification of social reference points and the dynamics of attention allocation have received little scholarly examination. We address performance feedback from...