As emphasized by Barney (1986), any explanation of superior profitability must account for why the resources supporting such profitability could have been acquired for a price below their rent-generating capacity. Building upon the literature iti economics on coordination failures and incomplete...

To what extent can one infer that superior capabilities are driving sustained superior performance? Modeling performance as some combination of differences in capabilities and processes of cumulative advantage, we argue that a Bayesian framework in which decision makers take into account the...

Successfully predicting that something will become a big hit seems impressive. Managers and entrepreneurs who have made successful predictions and have invested money on this basis are promoted, become rich, and may end up on the cover of business magazines. In this paper, we show that an...

Many organizational actions need not have any immediate or direct payoff consequence but set the stage for subsequent actions that bring the organization toward some actual payoff. Learning in such settings poses the challenge of credit assignment (Minsky 1961), that is, how to assign credit for...

Classic literature on organizations recognizes that the paramount function of an organization is the coordination of physical and human assets to produce a good or service (e.g., Barnard, 1938; Chisholm, 1989; Schein, 1985). Coordination in this early literature was defined broadly, as for example by...

Performance sampling models of duration dependence in employee turnover and firm exit predict that hazard rates will initially be low, gradually rise to a maximum, and then fall. Some empirical duration distributions have bimodal hazard rates, however. In this paper, we present a generalization...