Strategy is concerned with sustained interfirm profitability differences. Observations of such sustained differences are often attributed to unobserved systematic a priori differences in firm characteristics. This paper shows that sustained interfirm profitability differences may be very likely...

If knowledge is to be managed and transferred, it is essential that members of organizations know and agree on where capabilities reside. Few studies, however, have examined the difficulties of evaluating capabilities in large firms. This paper reports an in-depth empirical study of capabilities...

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...

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 in economics on coordination failures and incomplete...

The observed association between performance and organizational risk taking has usually been attributed to the influence of performance on risk preferences. Here I show how a simple model of adaptation, which only assumes that organizations avoid activities with poor past performance, can...

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. As we note in this paper, however, several empirical duration distributions have bimodal hazard rates. This paper...