This paper develops and tests a model of how organizational structure influences organizational performance. Organizational structure, conceptualized as the decision-making structure among a group of individuals, is shown to affect the number of initiatives pursued by organizations, and the...

A long-standing question in the organizations literature is whether firms are better-off by using simple or complex representations of their task environment. We address this question by developing a formal model of how firm performance depends on the process by which firms learn and use...

Understanding positioning is a central concern for strategy. We offer a rich, but tractable, formalization of competitive positioning that is explicit about how the success of firms' policy choices in the face of competition is impacted by the multiple attributes along which firms can create...

This paper delves into the effects that strategic representations have on firm performance. It does so in four ways. First, it describes different types of representations—internal, external, and distributed—and it points to their pervasiveness in strategy. Second, it presents a framework to...

Management is fundamentally about making decisions. In organizations, key decisions are often made by groups -- boards, senior management teams, finance committees and so on -- rather than by single individuals. Thus, an important role of the person leading a decision-making team is to know how...

Managers' mental representations affect the perceived payoffs and alternatives that managers consider. Thus, mental representations affect how managers search for profitable strategies as well as the quality of strategies they discover. To study how mental representation and search interact, we...

We study four information aggregation structures commonly used by organizations to evaluate opportunities: individual decision making, delegation to experts, majority voting, and averaging of opinions. Using a formal mathematical model, we investigate how the performance of each of these...

Strategy is about making decisions -- decisions such as which industry to enter, how to position the firm and its products, which resources to develop or to buy, who to hire, and which organizational structure to use. It is no surprise, then, that much research within the strategy field has...

An emerging management trend is to use the “wisdom of the crowd” to make decisions traditionally made by the top management alone. Research on this phenomenon has focused mainly on the capacity of crowds to generate ideas, but much less is known about a crowd’s capacity to select ideas. To...

This paper studies how cognitive and structural antecedents affect adaptation to disruptive innovations. We do so by analyzing how video game firms adapted to the "free-to-play" business model around the period of disruption (2012-2015). Our dataset (which contains 461 firms, collectively...