Firm Strategy and Age Dependence: A Contingent View of the Liabilities of Newness, Adolescence, and Obsolescence
研究了美国个人电脑行业中企业技术战略（专有战略与标准战略）如何影响年龄依赖模式，发现不同战略下企业分别呈现青春期劣势或过时劣势，且年龄与战略的联合效应在销售增长与失败风险间产生长期权衡。
Unlike prior research on organizational age dependence, which has described entire populations as exhibiting a liability of newness, adolescence, or obsolescence, this study adopts a contingent view by considering the interactive effects of age and technology strategy. Distinctions are drawn between proprietary strategists, who use internally developed, firm-specific technologies, and standards-based strategists, whose technologies conform with open and publicly available specifications. Results of a study of the firms in the U.S. personal computer industry show that technology strategy had two important influences on aging. First, age dependence varied across strategies. For example, standards-based strategists exhibited a liability of adolescence in their failure rates, while proprietary strategists exhibited a liability of obsolescence. Second, the joint effects of age and strategy produced long-term trade-offs across different performance outcomes. For instance, rates of sales growth increased with age for proprietary strategists, yet so did their risks of failure. Overall, this study suggests that multiple patterns of age dependence may simultaneously exist within a single population.