Approximately 80-90 percent of new firms ultimately fail. The tendency is to think of this failure as wasteful. We, however, examine whether there are economic benefits to offset the waste. We characterize three potential mechanisms through which excess entry affects market structure, firm...

Strategic imitation occurs when a firm purposefully attempts to reproduce, in whole or part, other firms’ products, processes, capabilities, technologies, structures, and/or decisions in its pursuit of competitive advantage. Imitation is a pervasive firm behavior, and the literature relating...

How should decision-making be organized in entrepreneurial teams when founders exhibit confidence biases? New ventures are commonly founded by teams of entrepreneurs, who must employ a decision-making structure that implicitly or explicitly defines how individual beliefs are aggregated into team...

We take a microfoundational approach to understanding the origin of heterogeneity in firms’ capacity to adapt to technological change. We develop a computational model of individual-level learning in an organizational setting characterized by interdependence and ambiguity. The model leads to...

Entrants are often viewed as suffering from a “liability of newness” — at founding they rarely possess the knowledge and capabilities necessary to compete and survive. They can overcome this liability by learning vicariously from the knowledge of incumbent firms. But how can entrants learn...

While pre-entry experience is widely regarded as a critical asset that positively relates to new entrant performance, empirical support is mixed. To address this inconsistency, we meta-analyze the empirical findings in 272 papers that examine the performance implications of pre-entry experience....

This paper develops and tests a model of the effectiveness of selection processes in eliminating less fit organizations from a population when organizations are undergoing adaptive change. Stable organizational traits, such as a search strategy or routine, do not imply that an organization's...