The present article examines two important effects that have been given scant attention in prior studies of variable risk strategies. The first effect, reference group sensitivity, is the degree to which decision makers' aspirations are sensitive to their reference group. In this paper we...

This paper pursues a research agenda inspired by Richard Nelson and Sidney Winter’s Evolutionary Theory of Economic Change (1982). This seminal work applied the Darwinian concepts of variation, replication and selection to the evolution of firms. It proposed a level of evolution, replication...

The arguably dominant contemporary approach to the analysis of sustained competitive advantage is the resource-based view. Taking Barney (1991) and Peteraf (1993) as representative summary statements of the view, we argue that much resource-based research rests on partial, implicit and...

The purpose of the present article is to strengthen the conceptualisation of the principle of selection in theories of economic evolution and to help clarify a number of unsettled issues regarding the meaning of variety and continuity. In order to achieve this, the emerging general mathematical...

To advance the RBV we propose separation of necessary and additional conditions for the expression of SCA. We argue that there are only two necessary conditions, namely uncertainty and immobility and that all other conditions are additional. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

We examine an aspect of the argument of Teppo Felin and Nicolai Foss (‘The Endogenous Origins of Experience, Routines, and Organizational Capabilities: The Poverty of Stimulus’; 2011) where they reject the claim of Geoffrey Hodgson and Thorbjørn Knudsen (‘Darwinism, Causality and the...

This article discusses the limits of a purely transaction cost explanation of the existence of the firm by pointing to additional factors. A simple heuristic model shows that firm-specific learning effects can overcome the costs of monitoring employees, and explain the existence of the firm even...