Archive for August, 2008
Substitutes in Creating Complementarities
| Lasse Lien |
I have just been reading the Porter and Siggelkow paper in the most recent issue of Academy of Mgmt. Perspectives. The paper summarizes the status of the “complementarity/NK-modelling/activity systems” perspective in competitive strategy. I am anything but an expert in this theory, but I thought I would share one reflection, mainly because it allows me to use the fancy title above.
As many O&M readers will know, a main take-away from this perspective is that an activity system with strong complementarities may enjoy protection against imitation. Some choices in an activity system will presumably be unobservable for outsiders, and getting everything right at once is less likely the more linkages there are between activities. Furthermore, the penalty for failing to get everything right increases with the strength of the complementarities.
My problem is that more and stronger complementarities should presumably speed up learning, because there are more and stronger feedback mechanisms putting pressure to move each activity in the beneficial direction. An increasing number of complementary activities presumably imply that each individual activity is encouraged to move in the “right” direction by many other activities, and stronger complementarities imply stronger pressure from each of them.
So while many and strong complementarities reduce the likelihood of perfect imitation and increase the penalty for imperfection, the rapid learning produced by an improved feedback mechanism may conceivably make the road to perfection rather short. Couldn’t these effects conceivably cancel each other out, or the latter effect even dominate the former? Or in other words — forgive the pun — aren’t these two mechanisms (precise imitation and rapid learning) substitutes in the pursuit of complementarity?
New Center for Economic Documents Digitization
| Peter Klein |
Below is an announcement from the St. Louis Fed about its new digital document library, the Center for Economic Documents Digitization (CEDD). A nice complement to the CORI K-Base, Connie Helfat and Steve Klepper’s FIVE project, and similar resources. Three cheers for the Digital Age!
The Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis recently introduced the Center for Economic Documents Digitization (CEDD), with a mission to preserve the nation’s economic history through digitization. To date, CEDD has digitized more than 300,000 pages of published material and archival collections from the Federal Reserve System and selected partners — currently, the Brookings Institution, the Government Printing Office and the Missouri Historical Society.
This storehouse of documents includes U.S. government publications, Federal Reserve publications, photographs, manuscripts, and multimedia formats, all available on the St. Louis Fed’s FRASER (Federal Reserve Archival System for Economic Research) website: http://fraser.stlouisfed.org. (more…)
Top Management Scholars, Journals, and Universities
| Peter Klein |
Rankings, rankings, more rankings. . . . If you like to bibliometric analysis of individual researchers, journals, and universities you’ll find more than you can handle in “Scholarly Influence in the Field of Management: A Bibliometric Analysis of the Determinants of University and Author Impact in the Management Literature in the Past Quarter Century” by Philip Podsakoff, Scott MacKenzie, Nathan Podsakoff, and Daniel Bachrach (Journal of Management 34, no. 4 (2008): 641-720). Over 25,000 individual scholars are reviewed, their institutions evaluated, journal impact factors computed, and numbers crunched hither and yon. Some qualitative conclusions:
The findings showed that (a) a relatively small proportion of universities and scholars accounted for the majority of the citations in the field; (b) total publications accounted for the majority of the variance in university citations; (c) university size, the number of PhDs awarded, research expenditures, and endowment assets had the biggest impact on university publications; and (d) total publications, years in the field, graduate school reputation, and editorial board memberships had the biggest effect on a scholar’s citations.
Organizations and Markets 
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