The Timing of Resource Development and Sustainable Competitive Advantage
构建了一个竞争企业资源开发时机的正式模型，分析了时间压缩不经济如何形成模仿壁垒，并发现可持续竞争优势不一定带来卓越绩效，模仿者有时会因吸收能力下降而受益。
We develop a formal model of the timing of resource development by competing firms. Our aim is to deepen and extend resource-level theorizing about sustainable competitive advantage. Our analysis formalizes the notion of barriers to imitation, particularly those based on time compression diseconomies where the faster a firm develops a resource, the greater the cost. Time compression diseconomies are derived from a micromodel of resource development with diminishing returns to effort. We use a continuous time model of the flows of development costs and market revenues, which allows us to integrate strategic and financial analyses of firm investment problems. We examine two dimensions of sustainability: whether the resources underlying a firm’s competitive advantage are economically imitable and, if so, how long imitation takes. Surprisingly, we show that sustainable competitive advantage does not necessarily lead to superior performance. We find that imitators sometimes benefit from reductions in their absorptive capacity and that innovators should license either all or none of their knowledge. Despite recent criticisms, we reaffirm the usefulness of a resource level of analysis for strategy research, especially when the focus is on resources developed through internal projects with identifiable stopping times.