Making the Next Move: How Experiential and Vicarious Learning Shape the Locations of Chains' Acquisitions
研究了连锁企业为何选择特定收购目标，发现经验学习使其复制自身，替代学习则模仿其他连锁企业的选址，从而解释连锁企业的空间扩张模式。
We examine acquisitions by multiunit chain organizations to determine why they acquire a particular target rather than others that are available to them and thus better understand chain growth. We advance experiential and vicarious learning processes as an explanation for chains' next spatial move. Our analysis of Ontario nursing home chains' acquisition location choices from 1971 to 1996 provides broad support for a learning perspective, demonstrating how experiential and vicarious processes shape and constrain the locations of chains' acquisitions. Experiential processes lead chains to replicate themselves by acquiring components geographically and organizationally similar to their own most recent and most similar prior acquisitions and their own current components. Vicarious processes lead chains to imitate location choices of other visible and comparable chains' most recent acquisitions, prior acquisitions nearest to potential targets, and their current components. Our study thus establishes organizational learning as a conceptual foundation for predicting the location of a chain's next acquisition and, more generally, the spatial expansion of chains over time.