This paper investigates the impact of social ties on the effectiveness of boards of directors. When the chief executive officer (CEO) and a number of directors belong to the same social networks, the CEO is less likely to be dismissed for poor performance. The results are robust to different...

We explore why some employees may be at a disadvantage in searching for information in organizations. The "small-world" argument in social network theory emphasizes that people are, on average, only a few connections away from the information they seek. However, we argue that such a network...

Research in organizational learning has demonstrated processes and occasionally performance implications of acquisition of declarative (know-what) and procedural (know-how) knowledge. However, considerably less attention has been paid to learned characteristics of relationships that affect the...

We examine how firms can create word-of-mouth peer influence and social contagion by designing viral features into their products and marketing campaigns. To econometrically identify the effectiveness of different viral features in creating social contagion, we designed and conducted a...

We quantify how user mobile Internet usage relates to unique characteristics of the mobile Internet. In particular, we focus on examining how the mobile-phone-based content generation behavior of users relates to content usage behavior. The key objective is to analyze whether there is a positive...

What lines of communication among members of an organization are most productive in the early, ideation phase of innovation? We investigate this question with a recombination and selection model of knowledge transfer operating through a social network. We find that ideation is accelerated when...

Firms introducing network technologies (whose benefits depend on who installs the technology) need to understand which user characteristics confer the greatest network benefits on other potential adopters. To examine which adopter characteristics matter, I use the introduction of a...

This paper aims to ascertain the influence of social networks in the university spinout phenomenon. With respect to the instrumental role of social networks, it adopts a content contingency perspective pertaining to the role of closure and structural holes, and examines the interaction between...

Although alliance studies have generally favored an ambidextrous approach between exploration and exploitation, they tend to overlook a firm's characteristics, its industry constraints, or the dynamic network in which the firm is embedded. This study examines the ambidexterity hypothesis and its...

Learning by doing represents an important mechanism through which organizations prosper. Some firms, however, learn from their experience at a dramatic rate, while other firms exhibit very little learning at all. Three factors have been identified that affect the rate at which firms learn: (a)...